Imagine if you started your onboarding process with all the information you need. Not just the raw data, but everything required to make a decision, along with a user-friendly executive risk report. How much time would you save on onboarding, and what could you accomplish with all that extra time?
It may sound like a dream, but it doesn’t have to stay one. While there are a few things like surveys and attestations you need to get directly from a vendor, essentially everything else can be in your hands, sorted, compiled, and ready for review within a couple days of starting the process. Read on to learn how it works, and what it could do for your procurement team.
Why Onboarding Takes so Long
Gathering and sorting through information is typically the biggest hurdle in onboarding. For most companies it takes a month or more, and for large organizations, it can take as much as six months to get all the information you need.
Even with the majority of companies digitized, onboarding remains slow and painstaking. But while scoping, negotiating contracts, and defining things like SLAs and security controls will always take time, the biggest part — the information gathering stage — really doesn’t have to.
In some ways, things have already gotten better for most companies. Data gathering has historically been a pain point, but it’s less of an issue now — at least, in theory. Data aggregators and other online resources make it easier and quicker to access background data, from financials, to reputation, to compliance posture, assuming you have access to the right resources.
But the biggest challenge still remains: the grunt work of gathering, compiling, and reporting on the data. Indeed, for companies without a supplier intelligence platform, it’s more time-consuming than ever, simply because there’s much more you’re expected to do. For a critical supplier, procurement is forced to work their way through massive piles of information, from dozens or even hundreds of sources. Just combing through all that data and surfacing major insights can take weeks or even months. And with the complexity of modern supply chains, you have more vendors to verify than ever before.
And then there’s workflow. You’re dealing with multiple datastreams in different formats and different locations to begin with. On top of that, you have whatever idiosyncratic combination of Slack, email, Google Chat, Zoom, and other messaging and conferencing apps your stakeholders use, with data likely to spill out over multiple drives and cloud platforms. Getting all the reviews, signoffs and revisions you need can drag on for weeks, if not months.
The Consequences of Slow Onboarding
Staying with subpar vendors
Slow onboarding means more work and less agility. The direct financial costs of all those work hours are significant, but the opportunity costs are even greater. You can’t respond quickly to changes in marketing conditions, and the workload to bring in a new partner incentivizes you to remain with existing vendors, even when there may be more competitive or reliable options. Digging deep into alternate sourcing strategies is almost out of the question; it just takes too much time to research.
Sloppy risk management
That’s not the only perverse incentive. The system also encourages a “tick the box and move on” approach to onboarding. You need to define your concerns as narrowly as you can, or else you’ll never get the vendor through the process. This can lead you to miss warning signs that are more difficult to track down, such as sub-tier vendor lists or news stories that might surface worrying financial signs that haven’t shown up in the quarterlies.
And you’re under time pressure when you sort data too, which means even in the documents you prioritize, there’s a heightened chance of missing something important.These factors can increase a range of risks, from cybersecurity breach, to insider IP theft, to partnering with an unreliable (or even unsustainable) partner.
Onboarding Without Waiting
For how overwhelming these problems can seem, they’re surprisingly easy to fix. In fact, as we’ll show, they’re already solved by supplier intelligence platforms powered by AI. We believe that Craft provides the most impactful onboarding solution on the market, but we’re keeping the information vendor neutral, so you’ll know what features to look for. Whoever you decide to work with, your supplier intelligence platform should provide:
- Access to all the supplier information you need in one place
- Embedded AI to surface the most relevant data
- A single, auditable workflow in-platform
All the supplier info at your finger tips
Your supplier intelligence platform should provide complete access to all the categories of vendor data you’re using now, along with any risk data you might need in the future. This isn’t just for the sake of showing off horsepower; having this information on hand lets your platform grow with you.
With the platform doing the grunt work, there’s no extra time cost to considering more categories of information, so you can start looking deeper into categories like sub-tier analysis, global supply chain mapping, and reputational data when you’re ready. To give you an idea about how much information a platform should make available, Craft brings over 500 data points across more than 1,300 data streams.
Embedded AI to surface relevant data
A supplier intelligence platform is the ideal application for AI. The technology gets the most hype in more creative use cases, but where it really excels is as a workhorse, drawing out information from a pre-selected corpus and reporting it according to well-defined rules.
For onboarding, it’s an absolute gamechanger. It can pour over all the categories of information you’re looking for, draw out anything that’s relevant to your onboarding process, and report it in a clear, economical style that makes your job easy.
Auditable workflow tools
Being able to do everything in the platform that reports your data makes things a lot easier. You won’t have to deal with your workflow sprawling across chat tools and drives, and you’ll have a complete record of your due diligence. And it’s just nice from a workflow perspective to have everything you need to do onboarding in one place.
How Onboarding Changes With Instant Info
Obviously, the biggest change is acceleration. With info ready and analysis, just a few clicks away, vendor risk assessment goes from about 43 days down to 3. Reporting and workflow tools can speed other stages of onboarding as well, both by managing workflow and giving you data that’s useful for anticipating needed controls and contract negotiation.
More strategic procurement
With that change, you can be more dynamic with your vendor portfolio. You’ll be able to onboard new suppliers in response to changing market conditions, even in critical areas.
You’ll also have more team time and better intelligence, giving your procurement team the opportunity to mature and become more strategic. You can improve monitoring, work with suppliers to improve in response to negative signals, do deeper comparisons of suppliers to optimize your vendor portfolio, and fine-tune your supply strategy to address risk, compliance, cost, and other goals.
Industries with rigorous onboarding
In highly demanding industries like aerospace and defense, the time-saving benefits are especially significant, since companies typically have to do more due diligence. You’ll get a clearer, more reliable vendor evaluation, since you’ll have a complete point-in-time overview, rather than potentially trickling info in over several months. And of course, analysis will be a lot simpler, with less risk of human error.
Less rigorous industries
If you’re in an industry with a less rigorous onboarding process, you’ll be able to increase your information quality and rely less on self-reporting. The technology also empowers you to improve your onboarding process, addressing risks you wouldn’t look at in the past, while saving time.
Faster Onboarding, Better Results
Whatever your industry, taking the waiting and paper shuffling out of onboarding is a huge win. Craft can help you do away with manual processes, reduce frustration, and save time and money on onboarding.
Contact us to try it for yourself.