It has been over 2 years since Oracle PeopleSoft first introduced the new self-service Supplier onboarding capabilities in Release 9.2. Customers across industries are excited about improving data management and potentially saving hundreds of dollars in administration costs per Supplier by converting their manual onboarding processes to a completely electronic, role-based, template-driven method. New Supplier profile questions in Release 9.2 help customers manage Supplier diversity, certification and other Supplier attributes and attachments. Customers are also taking advantage of the Supplier Administration WorkCenter for centralizing all of the tasks of administering Suppliers, and providing deep visibility and insight into bidder and Supplier registration request profiles through three new Supplier registration pivot grid analytics. Why is this important to you? Because electronically managing the administration activities around a Supplier and making them more self-sufficient frees your staff for more value-added tasks that can save an organization several hundreds of dollars per Supplier. Multiply this savings by your total number of Suppliers and you can quickly see that implementing an electronic self-service Supplier registration tool can conservatively save an organization millions of dollars.
Thanks to PeopleSoft Selective Adoption, we have delivered several additional Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) enhancements on top of the Release 9.2 code line, and you will be seeing a plethora of additional SLM enhancements rolled out over time. These enhancements are focused on helping you strategically manage your Suppliers and ensure compliance while improving Supplier performance and relationships. You will notice an improvement in data management and accuracy while reducing Supplier risk, giving you more time to focus on your core business while PeopleSoft helps improve the bottom line. More specifically, we are addressing the challenges we have heard that you are facing around administering and monitoring Supplier-related activity.
For example, inevitably Supplier profile information will
change over time and you need a way to capture up-to-date information about
your Suppliers while ensuring data accuracy and approvals around Supplier
master updates. In Image 11, PeopleSoft introduced the new Self-Service
Supplier Change Request, a configurable template-driven tool for capturing Supplier
profile changes, and routing these change requests through approval workflow
prior to updating your Supplier master.
You may be looking for tools to help you tactically and strategically manage your Suppliers. In Image 10, PeopleSoft added a new Supplier 360 Degree view of all information related to a Supplier that gives you full visibility and oversight into spend, compliance and performance. And from here, you can access the new Supplier Comparative Analysis tool and compare these elements across multiple Suppliers to help identify, for example, opportunities for new contracts or Suppliers that are underperforming.
PeopleSoft has plans to deliver additional Supplier Lifecycle Management capabilities to meet your business needs. We hear from many of you that keeping track of diversity status and other credentials are a challenge, yet a requirement for state and federal reporting mandates that you keep this information current and accessible. You may also have requirements around making sure Suppliers are qualified to do business with you, and remain qualified over time. This could extend to verifying credit risk, making sure up-to-date certifications are on file, signing off on references, proactively monitoring performance and reviewing safety records. Supplier Scorecarding is another capability requested from many of our customers. Scorecarding may include subjective performance indicators such as responsiveness and customer service, and also factor in electronically-captured Supplier key performance indicators to give you an overall Supplier ‘score’. Finally, what is the Supplier’s user experience when they interact with your system using PeopleSoft’s Supplier-side facing pages via the Supplier Portal? It’s important that the application is intuitive and helps guide the Suppliers to the exact information or activity that is most important to them, and most useful for you.
PeopleSoft has been working with our customers to design
solutions that are focused on addressing these business needs. Most of these
enhancements are planned to be available with a PeopleSoft Purchasing or
Payables license with no separate license requirement! Look for new Supplier Lifecycle Management
solutions becoming available soon.