Use Technology to Improve Your Relationships with Your Suppliers

There are lots of great ways to improve your business by using technology.

And yet, technology can also often be seen as creating problems too. When it comes to automating business processes specifically, it can sometimes be viewed as something that interferes with relationships among stakeholders, specifically your critical suppliers. A good example is your ERP. There’s a chance that when you launched NetSuite, there was some internal friction between key stakeholders at your business learning a new ERP and adjusting to change and automation.

It doesn’t have to be that way. First, automating your internal processes should help your business relationships, not hinder them. And second, here at SourceDay we have custom solutions you can use that will do away with all the friction and the grumbling when you extend the automation of NetSuite to your suppliers for more accurate and proactive collaboration on critical supply chain purchase orders.

Manual business processes cause friction and waste

A lot of the time, when you’ve automated business processes, you quickly forget how painful it was the old way of doing things. So, it’s a good exercise, when you think that your new processes are causing difficulties, to remember how it used to be. Manual and paper-based processes by their very nature are time-consuming and inefficient, throwing sand in the gears of good supplier relationships. Automation on your end with NetSuite means less wasted time for your team members, so now they can focus more on things that matter, where previously they were doing a lot of firefighting.

But NetSuite didn’t necessarily automate the purchase order lifecycle with your suppliers. So there still might be communication problems, lack of visibility, and manual processes that are hindering your supplier relationships. SourceDay’s Built for NetSuite SuiteApp and our Supplier Managed Service, in which SourceDay’s solutions and services are provided free to your suppliers, bring the power of NetSuite to them, automate all the business processes between you and your suppliers, and brings the necessary visibility, automated collaboration, and tracking of all critical PO lifecycle interactions.

Automated business processes facilitate healthy relationships

Another thing to remember about when you launched NetSuite is that it automated a whole bunch of boring, repetitive work for your team. It’s that kind of work that makes people dislike their jobs and feel unappreciated, leading to morale problems and employee retention risks. In today’s tight labor market, those are big problems, so making them go away was a big win.

SourceDay takes all that one step further. When you add our PO Collaboration and/or AP Automation tools, more of that mundane work is automated for your people, making them happier and giving them the ability to focus their time on more strategic and fulfilling activities. And bringing those tools to your suppliers means they get the same benefits, so that the frequency of interpersonal “we have a problem” communications is reduced on both sides, win-win!

Technology allows you to manage by exception, not by volume

As a NetSuite user, it’s a pretty good bet that you’re in a high-growth business where management by volume simply can’t scale. You lose track of important details in the noise, and pretty soon you have problems popping up that are complete surprises. The only way to effectively keep up as you rapidly grow is to manage by exception, with quick knowledge of where things are out of whack, across all your business processes.

NetSuite helps with that on your end, but only to a degree. And it doesn’t help at all with suppliers who have no visibility to your NetSuite instance.

SourceDay’s collaboration tools bring everything into central dashboards that create complete transparency for both you and your suppliers. By adding further automation to critical business processes and helping highlight where things just aren’t right, it makes management by exception a breeze, for both you and your suppliers, further solidifying your crucial partnerships and leading to enhanced supplier relationships.

Technology fosters dynamic supplier relationships

What’s more, having that complete transparency makes your relationships much more collaborative. By greatly minimizing the pain points that are typical in supplier relationships, it helps create healthy partnerships that take your business to a new level.

On your end, SourceDay’s functionality like our supplier scorecard help you better evaluate your contract manufacturers. Having real-time scorecards available to both you and the supplier brings transparency to the relationship and makes evaluating performance and conducting productive business reviews a snap. Fully digitized business processes facilitate quicker and smoother supplier changes when they’re needed.

Making SourceDay available to your suppliers is a big win too. They make their lives easier, their team members’ job better, and their businesses more efficient, making them better suppliers for you and further fostering that collaborative partnership. 

To win at business, you need collaboration, and we help you get it

Technology should never be a source of conflict with your suppliers. It should support what you need: your people and your suppliers’ people collaborating together to make the businesses on both sides of the fence better and more successful. With SourceDay’s solutions, bringing the power of NetSuite and our own enhancements to bear on automating business processes, creating full transparency between you and your external partners, and fostering productive partnerships, we help you win at business.

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