Vendor Onboarding Software - Digital Onboarding

Introduction

Vendor onboarding is the process of gathering the documents and data needed to set up a vendor. Here vendor in the sense, the whole league of suppliers, merchants, partners, and more. To have a high-performing vendor in your company’s supply chain, you need a robust vendor onboarding Process.

Manual onboarding is slow and expensive. The flurry of emails, answering questions, etc. wastes valuable man-hours. The vendor registration process is supposed to be simple, not an obstacle. Collecting everything you need upfront with minimal data entry sets the stage for long-term beneficial relationships.

Automation of vendor onboarding expedites, standardizes, and streamlines the onboarding processes. Vendor onboarding solutions such as EDocGen helps you gather and manage vendor data and documentation digitally in a collaborative environment.

Who is it for

Vendor onboarding automation solution is important for every industry that deals with a large number of strategic suppliers/vendors/partners. It is not unusual for a major corporation to source from over 100,000+ suppliers.

1. Gig economy companies such as Uber, Lyft, Grab, etc. onboard thousands of driving partners.
2. Large E-commerce businesses work with a large number of small businesses.
3. Retailers such as Walmart, Costco, Target, Kroger have partnerships with thousands of suppliers across the globe
4. Pharma companies partner with a large number of doctors.

With limited resources and busy buyer schedules, individual suppliers receive very little attention during onboarding. This leads to an elongated cycle time. A software-led standardized and efficient vendor/partners onboarding improves the business productivity. An ideal system should support the following.

1. For an organization with vendors all over the globe, the software must support multi-lingual documents and forms.
2. Easily integrates with other internal enterprise systems including ERP and supplier systems.
3. It has to be business user-friendly. They should be able to change the templates, forms, and processes on their own without IT intervention.

EDocGen is the perfect vendor onboarding software. It provides a faster and easier way to request, receive, validate and approve information from your prospective vendors. The following section describes how it works.

How it works

The system is business user-friendly and it’s extremely easy to produce onboarding documents.

Step1: Upload onboarding templates

Upload your templates to the system from your computer or cloud storage such as OneDrive. For details on how to prepare your templates, please refer to how-to prepare templates .

1. Upload single or multiple templates into the system
2. The vendor filled-in data can populate single or multiple onboarding documents, in one-go. If you want to create an on-boarding document package, after uploading, merge the templates.

Step2: Auto-create the form from the template.

Either you can directly auto-create a fillable form from the onboarding template or pre-populate it with existing data in your internal systems to create a partially filled-in form.

Auto-create directly

1. The system generates an empty form from the template.
   
   
   
   
2. This form URL can be shared with your vendors for filling.
3. There are options to
1. Set fields as mandatory/optional.
2. Create various kinds of fields including drop-down menus, radio-buttons, tables, etc.
3. Place field level checks for the date, email, and number fields.
4. Create Multi-page forms.
   
   

Pre-populate before Auto-creating form

1. You can pre-fill the template(s) with the supplier data you already have in your systems. This would reduce the data entry for vendors
2. Share these pre-filled form URLs with vendors.

These forms very versatile and can capture various field types including tables, QR Codes, hyperlinks, etc. They can upload documents, images, and certificates through the form. They get attached to the final generated document. If you wish, you can ask the vendors to E-Sign the form. The signature gets transferred to the generated document.

Step3: Onboarding documents generation

Partners need not fill in all the details at once. They can fill in as little as they can and save those forms as drafts. These drafts can be updated any number of times, before submission. Until and unless all the mandatory fields are filled, the vendors will not be able to submit the form.

Submission of form creates a Word/PDF document, based on the preference you set. Once the onboarding document is created, you would receive a notification with document(s) attachment. This document could be a part of the document work-flow.

Benefits

The system provides all the necessary tools for increasing the effectiveness of your vendor onboarding team. It streamlines the supplier’s onboarding process by collecting all necessary data, forms, and documentation online, and makes it easier for your enterprise organization to move forward quickly with procurement processes.

1. Allows potential vendors to submit documents and information online at the place and time of their choice.
2. Minimal and More accurate data entry: You can auto-populate the vendor data residing in your systems and asking them to fill only the missing data. This reduces data entry for vendors. Moreover, the system creates fillable forms from templates. Filling documents through forms is 80% faster and saves users time in duplicate data entry for repeat fields.
3. Collect vendor master data once, update when needed: Though vendor is successfully onboarded and doing business, time-to-time there would be maintenance activities. These include insurance renewals, licenses, permits, regulatory compliances, etc. Vendor business also changes and may need to update sales & use tax etc. The system allows you to create a form from the published documents as well, making these updates smooth for vendors.
4. Significantly improves the accuracy of supplier data.
5. · Reduces cost and overhead by eliminating paper. Thus, it’s easier to meet mandatory compliance requirements and bring in more visibility into entire process.
6. Includes a workflow to route documents. You can route the generated document(s) to internal teams after the successful submission.

Conclusion

EDocGen is API first product. It integrates with your internal systems such as ERP, financial, system, supply chain, etc. to update vendor masters and validate the information. This ensures all suppliers are compliant.

It’s the best partner onboarding software that creates a win-win for all stakeholders. Give it a try.