Introduction
Effective supplier management allows you to meet your customers’ demands by facilitating control, coordination, and continuous monitoring of your organization’s suppliers.
With Qflow, you can enhance every stage of the process, reducing the costs and risks of your operations, and optimizing communication and efficiency in your supplier management.
Learn about the process
Let’s take a look at a Supplier Management process designed in Qflow design.
The management begins with the registration of a new supplier, carried out through a form that requests the necessary information for the organization to begin receiving the services or goods provided by the supplier.
The documentation is then validated through a user task. If the information received is insufficient, a task is sent to the supplier to complete the missing data. If correct, the supplier is notified of their registration, and the work exchange becomes effective.
Supplier evaluation
An essential step in supplier management is their periodic evaluation. This allows for the quick detection of inefficiencies, avoiding the prolongation of consequences from negligent suppliers. Positive feedback in cases of satisfactory evaluations also strengthens the relationship with your suppliers.
Some aspects to evaluate may include service or product quality, delivery times, or costs. Specific KPIs can be established to base feedback on real facts and data to make evaluations effective.
In the process design, supplier evaluation is shown as a user task, triggered automatically after a set deadline in the timer event. For example, the organization may decide to evaluate its suppliers after six months of the start of their business relationship. If the result is positive, the time is renewed to six months from the last evaluation. In contrast, if the evaluation is negative, the supplier is notified and deregistered.
Document update
Another use for timer events in optimal supplier management is document updating.
In these cases, the timer event can set a date one month prior to the expiration metadata of the documentation entered in the registration form. Thus, the process notifies the supplier of the upcoming expiration of their documentation with sufficient time to consider its renewal.
Once the new documentation is submitted, a collaborator will receive the task to validate it, just as at the beginning of the process.
In this way, the organization avoids delays that may occur due to lack of documentation enabling suppliers to perform their role.
Useful features
Discover other Qflow features that can enhance your optimal supplier management:
Process initiation by external users
To facilitate supplier registration, the management process can be initiated through a public form. Thus, external users to the organization can complete the necessary information to register as suppliers of the company, accessing the form through a public link.
This functionality is enabled in the details of the process start step, by selecting the “Allow people outside the organization to start processes with this version of the template” checkbox, under the “share process” section.
Task response by external users
Similarly, the functionality of task response by external users allows for autonomous management of documentation by suppliers.
Implementing the example design for document updating, after the supplier is notified of the imminent expiration of their documentation, they will receive a task in their email to update it. To ensure that an external user receives and can respond to the task, the “Allow people outside the organization to respond to this task” checkbox must be checked, and the supplier’s email indicated in recipients, which can be obtained from the data entered in the registration form.
Time controls
Qflow time controls prevent bottlenecks by triggering automatic actions in response to delays in task responses.
For example, if the supplier takes longer than the established time to upload their updated documentation, they may receive an alert via email notifying them of the task’s expiration. Additionally, an assigned collaborator can be automatically notified of the delay, acting accordingly; either by contacting the supplier or deregistering them.
Conclusion
Comprehensive Supplier Management with Qflow simplifies your organization’s operations throughout the lifecycle of your suppliers.
It automates the registration and deregistration of collaborators, document management, and evaluations, improving your operational efficiency and ensuring greater customer satisfaction.
Try Qflow today and experience optimal Supplier Management!
