We bring together in one record who the supplier is, when each of its documents expires, how well it kept to its delivery dates last year and which price agreement is in force. The approved supplier list stops being an Excel file. A supplier portal connects to the same structure as an option.
When a company is asked 'where is your supplier list', the answer is usually the account card list in accounting. An account card is a commercial record: trading name, tax number, address, balance. The answers to the real questions about a supplier are not there. Is this firm an approved supplier, who approved it and on what basis? Are its tax registration certificate and insurance policy still valid? How many orders did it deliver on time last year, how many shipments arrived short? The decision to work with a new supplier is most often taken on an acquaintance's recommendation; the decision may turn out well or badly, but it is nowhere held with its reasoning and leaves no lesson for the next one. In time it becomes unclear even who on the list is genuinely active.
This has two concrete consequences. The first is document validity. The tax registration certificate, signature circular, insurance policy, undertaking or quality certificate obtained once from a supplier goes into a folder and is forgotten there. When it expires nobody notices; the gap comes to light either in a customer audit or after an incident. The second is price agreements. The list discussed at the start of the year sits in an email, while orders go through in the daily rush. Whether the agreed price was applied, whether the discount was given and whether the agreement is still in force are not checked regularly. The difference is usually seen at the year end, and by chance.
The supplier relationship management (SRM) layer we build gathers this information in a single supplier record. A new supplier first enters a pool, passes through a defined assessment and, once approved, is placed on the approved supplier list; who gave the approval and on what grounds stays on the record. Each supplier's documents are held together with their expiry dates, and before the date passes a reminder goes to both the responsible person inside the company and to the supplier. Contracts and price agreements are stored with their effective dates, so the order price can be compared against the agreement. Items such as delivery performance, quality rejections and response time to enquiries accumulate in a scorecard. The audit and visit calendar runs on the same record. For suppliers who want one a portal is opened: they upload their own documents, see their orders and submit their quotes there.
Let us write the boundary plainly. This page describes the commercial and administrative relationship with the supplier: registration, approval, scorecard, contract, documents and portal. Preparing for the social compliance audit your buyer asks of you, collecting evidence against a specific protocol, and tracking audit findings and corrective actions are a separate job, described on a separate page of this site. Roughly, the split is this: this page looks at 'should we work with this supplier and how is the relationship going', the other page at 'is our evidence ready when we are audited'. The two can share the same supplier record, and indeed they should; but they are not the same process. A second note on honesty: a scorecard on its own does not fix a supplier. What it does is move the conversation from impression to data, and make the decision on how work is allocated something that can be justified.
The value of this record emerges only to the extent that it is genuinely kept up.
Businesses working with hundreds rather than dozens of firms. At this scale, who is active, who is approved and whose documents are missing can no longer be held in memory. Records that have seen no movement for years sit in the same place as the suppliers doing critical work and cannot be told apart. The clean-up itself is the first concrete gain in most companies.
Companies whose buyers audit them regularly or put questions to them about their supply chain. In these businesses keeping supplier documents current is a commercial obligation. This page sets up the management of the documents and of the relationship; for the audit file, findings and corrective actions, see our compliance page. The two structures can work together on the same supplier record.
Manufacturers where the quality of a bought-in part goes straight into their own product. In these companies supplier selection is a quality decision, not a cost decision. The approval process, the first article assessment and the subsequent rejection rates accumulating in the same record take the decision out of personal opinion. Keeping an alternative source approved also runs from the same structure.
Manufacturers that put part of the work out. A subcontract workshop is both a supplier and an extension of production; when its capacity, documents and delivery performance are not tracked regularly, the risk comes straight back to you. Having a written and current record of who makes up the network is now the first thing many buyers ask for.
A new supplier first goes into a pool; it passes through a defined assessment form and, once approved, joins the approved supplier list. Who gave the approval, on what date and on what basis stays on the record. Approval can also be provisional or conditional; in that case, when the condition will be reviewed is tied to the calendar and is not forgotten.
The same firm being registered several times under different spellings is a common problem and distorts performance measurement from the outset. Matching is done on the tax number and duplicate records are merged. A link is established with the account card in the ERP; which record is the correct one is decided, and the other systems take it as their reference.
Items such as adherence to delivery dates, short or over-shipments, the quality rejection rate, invoice discrepancies and response time to enquiries accumulate by supplier. The weightings are set according to your priorities; the score of a supplier that is cheap but delivers late is formed accordingly. The scorecard is reported periodically and, if you wish, shared with the supplier.
Framework contracts, annual price lists, discount and payment terms are stored with their effective dates. End and renewal dates are flagged in advance. The order price can be compared against the agreement in force and deviating lines are listed. Managing contract text at clause level is a wider subject and lies outside the scope of this layer.
Tax registration certificates, signature circulars, insurance policies, quality and product certificates and undertakings are held together with their expiry dates. For a document approaching expiry a reminder goes to both the responsible person inside the company and to the supplier. A supplier whose document has lapsed is flagged on the list; if you wish, raising an order to that supplier can be tied to a warning.
How often each supplier is to be visited or audited is planned according to its criticality; upcoming visits appear in the calendar, and the notes and photographs from a visit go on record. The scope here is planning and record-keeping; collecting evidence against an audit protocol and closing findings is a separate structure.
A restricted area is opened for suppliers who want one: they upload their own documents, see their open orders and expected deliveries, and submit their quotes there. Use of the portal is not made compulsory; the data of a supplier that does not use it continues to be entered by your team. Forcing it usually backfires with small suppliers.
The existing account cards, Excel lists and the documents in folders are brought together; duplicate records are identified and active and inactive suppliers are separated. This stage is dull but decisive: a scorecard built on a dirty list produces wrong results from the first month. It usually takes one to two weeks.
The conditions under which a supplier is approved, and which item carries what weight in the scorecard, are set together with you. This is a management decision, not a technical one. We do not try to get the weightings perfect at the start; we correct them at the end of the first period by looking at real data. Starting with a small number of measurable items is healthier.
The supplier card, the document validity calendar and the contract and price agreement records are developed and linked to the account card in the ERP. Documents are digitised and uploaded; migrating the existing folder archive requires a separate plan. Scope varies, but in most installations this part takes four to eight weeks.
Items such as delivery date, quality rejections and invoice discrepancies are fed automatically from the purchasing and goods receipt records. In the first period the scorecard is monitored internally only and is not shared with suppliers; it is opened up once the data has become reliable. This wait is necessary so that the scorecard does not lose its credibility on day one.
If a portal is to be opened, it is piloted first with a limited number of suppliers. The system goes live; who updates which record, and in which period the scorecard is published, are left in writing. The flow for adding a new supplier is also handed over to the team. Maintenance and update support then continue under the SLA.
No, they are two separate jobs. This one manages the commercial and administrative relationship with the supplier: who is approved, which price is in force, whether the documents are valid, how delivery performance looks. The other page covers preparation for the audits your buyer carries out on you, and the collection of compliance evidence against a specific protocol. The two can share the same supplier record; but their processes, their users and their outputs differ. We clarify which one you need during discovery.
Not by themselves, and we do not promise that. What a scorecard does is take the conversation with a supplier away from the impression that 'it is always late from you' and base it on a concrete delivery history. Improvement comes from that conversation and from the decisions about how work is allocated. The scorecard also has to be fair; if the cases where the delay was caused by your own late order are not separated out, the supplier will rightly object and the scorecard will lose its credibility.
Some will, some will not. The high-volume suppliers you work with continuously usually adopt the portal; for the small firms you do business with a few times a year it is an extra burden and they will not use it. That is why we do not build the system to depend on the portal: the documents and data of a supplier that does not use it can be entered by your team. Making the portal compulsory usually does not improve data quality, it only pushes the supplier away.
It will not clash; it connects to it. The account card on the accounting side stays where it is and remains the statutory record; the SRM layer adds the relationship information to that card: approval status, documents, contract, scorecard. Matching is established on the tax number. If there are duplicate records they are identified at this stage; we decide together with you which one will be the correct record.
The difference is in the reminder and in ownership. Excel is a list; it tells nobody anything by itself and it is not clear who is to update it. An expired document is only noticed when someone opens the file, and that is usually when the need arises. In the system every document has an owner and an expiry date; when the date approaches the reminder goes out by itself and the missing document stays visible on the dashboard. You do not have to give up Excel entirely, but the tracking itself should not live there.
An approved supplier list that has been through assessment, with the reason for approval on record; supplier master data deduplicated on the tax number; a document archive with expiry dates and automatic reminders; contracts and price agreements with effective dates; a scorecard fed by delivery and quality data; an audit and visit calendar; an optional supplier portal. Everything is yours, including the source code, the database and the supplier history that accumulates.
In a 30-minute discovery call we listen to what you need and tell you honestly whether custom development or an off-the-shelf product is the better answer.
We build a layer that plans the shipment, assigns the vehicle and the route, compares carriers and freight rates, issues the e-waybill and collects proof of delivery from the field. If you run your own fleet, fuel, maintenance and document costs accumulate in the same system; if you work with hauliers, a record is kept of which job went to whom and at what price.
Details →We gather orders from your e-commerce site, marketplaces, the B2B dealer portal, the showroom and the telephone into a single pool. Stock is promised from one source rather than divided up channel by channel; the allocated quantity comes off it, and cancellations and returns come back into it. The aim is not to sell the same item twice, and to see where an order stands from a single screen.
Details →We gather all of a product's attributes, descriptions and translated texts in one centre, and produce the enriched version for each sales channel's own template from there. A field that is missing or breaks a rule is caught before the product goes out to the channel. Product data no longer lives in a file on somebody's desktop.
Details →We bring photographs, video, catalogues and design files together in a single archive, and record which product each file belongs to, which version is approved and where it may be used. The sizes and formats each channel asks for are derived automatically from the original, so nobody spends their time resizing files.
Details →We bring the store's till, stock, promotions and shift handover together in a single system. The POS here is not the virtual POS on your website; it is the real till on the counter. In multi-branch structures, prices and promotions are managed centrally and the day closes with the same discipline in every branch.
Details →We turn the production plan into a sequence at machine and line level: tooling and set-up times, bottleneck capacity, the date material will be ready and priority rules are calculated together. The result is a schedule that can genuinely be applied on the shop floor and a defensible due date that can be given to the customer.
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