Editor’s Note: Over the next few weeks on Payables Place, we’re publishing some “Best of” 2018 articles as we reflect on the year and prepare for the new year ahead.
Supplier Portals, also known as Vendor Portals, have played a significant role in enabling more suppliers globally to transact and communicate with their customers across the P2P process. These portals have, without a doubt, been a positive development for Accounts Payable (AP) since they first started to appear roughly 15 years ago. But like the saying goes, there can be too much of a good thing, or in this case for suppliers, “too many” portals. Portals can be a very valuable solution for users on both sides of a P2P transaction and almost every P2P, ePayables, or Business Network provider offers at least one solution and sometimes multiple portal options. Let’s take a look at how Portals are impacting different constituencies.
Portals: Impact on Buyers
For buying organizations, the upside leverage from deploying a portal can be tremendous. Self-service supplier portals enable companies to provide a single, cloud-based, solution, where suppliers can on-board themselves, as well as handle most, if not all, of their inquiry and customer service related needs. Portals can also provide significant financial benefits to their enterprise users by reducing the time, money, and resources previously required to perform the supplier enablement and information management tasks.
With a portal in place, suppliers can enter all of the specific information their buyer requires to start transacting business. This can be as basic as name, company, email contact, and phone numbers, or more complex information like certifications, remittance and banking information. With a more advanced solution (such as SAP Ariba, Coupa or Tradeshift), suppliers can be prompted to provide information required for payments, government forms such as W-8’s and W-9’s, and risk mitigation.
Buying organizations can now quickly and automatically perform a TIN check to verify that all information matches the IRS records, as well as proactively screen suppliers against national blacklists such as OFAC and EU to help prevent money laundering.
Portals: Impact on Suppliers
So far, this all sounds pretty great, right? A win-win for trading partners…and, for buying organizations, it mostly is. But now, let us take a look at things from a supplier perspective. On the surface everything looks and sounds pretty good. With a new portal, suppliers are able to enter their own vendor information and ensure its accuracy. In many cases portals enable suppliers to:
- Submit invoices
- Check the approval status of invoices
- Perform a PO-flip that automatically generates a corresponding invoice
- Check payment status of an invoice
- Select how they want to be paid (US ACH, International ACH, Paper Check, PayPal, Prepaid debit card)
- Select when they want to be paid by leveraging supply chain financing options available to them
- Communicate directly with their buyers to ask any additional questions
Undoubtedly, the ability to do these things generates real benefits for suppliers. When a supplier is using a few portals to manage eighty percent of their business, that is great. The trouble is that as suppliers grow their customer footprints, the number of different portals that they are ‘encouraged’ to use by their customers grows in a near-linear fashion.
I participated in a session at the APP2P conference in Orlando last year and one of the topics we discussed was supplier portals. The discussion became quite energized when suppliers started talking about the number of portals each were dealing with on a regular basis. One supplier discussed the challenges of using 8 different portals, (and many more instances/versions of those eight portals) including a different one for each of their largest customers. This supplier was not alone in the room – almost every other supplier participating in, and attending the session, voiced similar frustrations at having to use multiple portals.
Final Thoughts
A portal, in and of itself, is a good thing. But while setting up on one portal is fine, setting up on 8-10 is another story. Herein lies the crux of the problem: when suppliers are required to use multiple portals on a daily basis, the benefits and levels of satisfaction decrease in kind. All portals are not created equally, as mentioned earlier, some are more feature rich than others. Now the onus is on the supplier to remember what each portal can do and how they have to engage with their customer to get the information (invoice approval status, payment status, queries, etc.) they need. There is an opportunity cost to the supplier with each new portal they are mandated to use. I have talked to many suppliers who are frustrated by the amount of time they spend logging in and out of multiple systems every day just so they can do their jobs. In addition to the added time required to use the system, there may be additional costs the supplier needs to bear as well.
When you boil it down, the real problem is not that suppliers are required to use so many portals (that is merely a symptom). The real problem is the lack of interconnectivity between all of the different portals and networks. Think of it this way; what if you could only call and text people who had the same mobile phone carrier (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc.) as you did. And, if you wanted to speak to someone on another carrier, you were required to have a unique phone and account on that other network. It just wouldn’t fly in this day and age. Change is coming because the current situation is fast becoming untenable for suppliers. There is a huge opportunity for the technology vendor that can solve this challenge and provide organizations everywhere with the interconnectivity that is so sorely needed.
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