Supplier Relationship Management, New Concepts, New Tools

If your company is like many others, your purchasing department has probably an automated purchase ordering process via an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) like system. You may also have your IT department busy to show you how to email those POs that were created by the ERP system to the respective suppliers.

Chances are right now you are using a manual purchasing process with the majority of your suppliers, which involves phone calls, mail, facsimile, and e-mails to complete the entire process. Then the process repeats itself all over again when there is a price change, partial shipments, lead time updates, etc. If any of these purchasing processes sounds familiar, your company is probably still using an entirely manual paper trail. As a result you and your suppliers are wasting valuable company time entering and re-entering data in to your systems and wasting valuable space storing your information in file cabinets. Along with your manual purchasing processes, receiving, invoicing and payables processes are also following a similar flow. Imagine how many additional errors are created during these activities. Add to this complexity, your last night MRP run tells you to cancel, delay,