Building trust between suppliers and buyers?

An open understanding between the buyer and the supplier allows for smooth cooperation and minimizes risks related to the contract. Cloudia’s services provide a platform to help build trust between suppliers and buyers.

Supplier management is an essential part of the contract management process. The process involves evaluating suppliers, managing and monitoring suppliers’ performance during the contract period, managing supplier risks and developing supplier relationships.

By investing in the management of supplier relations, the purchasing organization can make itself a more attractive cooperation partner. Strong cooperation increases trust and supplier flexibility, which can, for example, directly shorten delivery times or increase innovation between organizations.

Supplier management and contract management in cooperation

Through the cooperation of contract and supplier management, supplier relations can be developed, maintained and monitored. At the same time, the risks associated with contracts and suppliers are reduced. But what does cooperation mean in practice?

In Cloudia’s services, supplier management helps you, among other things, monitor contracts by category or per supplier and check that your contracting partners fulfill their contractual obligations. The supplier’s performance can be monitored during the contract period, for example, by tracking the status of contracts, and details about the amount of terminated contracts and complaints. Performance monitoring also facilitates the evaluation of suppliers by category, ensuring that the best partners are selected in the future as well.

Supplier risks can be managed, for example, by ensuring that the supplier information is always up-to-date and not stored in emails and Excel spreadsheets. Risks can also be reduced by ensuring that users can view suppliers’ liability status, or any other documentation that they might have produced.

Increased visibility of supplier contracts and complaints

One of the challenges for people working in contract management is to gain an accurate and up-to-date understanding about all of the supplier contracts of the organization. In addition, without manual work, it can be difficult to see the value of contracts per supplier or, for example, the number of disputes that have been raised during the contract, as well as information about the discussion and resolution regarding these.

With the help of Cloudia’s services, each supplier’s contracts, possible claims, status of contracts and their values, can be seen together in one view. Grouping can be done, for example, by supplier, by industry or by product, so that all connected contracts and key KPIs are conveniently seen in one place.

The service displays all of the critical data about contracts that are with a specific supplier. Users can group suppliers by service or product, for example, and thereby gain visibility of all contracts created for suppliers in Cloudia Contract.

Benefits:

• The supplier’s contracts, disputes, contract status and values all in one view.
• The contracts are available per supplier and per group. You can define the grouping yourself and you can highlight, for example, how suppliers perform by industry or product.
• All contract data can be easily exported (.xlsx).
• The relevant data can be easily utilized, e.g. in a business intelligence tool.
• A better understanding of how suppliers actually perform under their contracts.

Requesting and managing contractors’ liability data

Manual collection of contractor liability documents takes a considerable amount of time. Moreover, their management is difficult if they are not systematically stored together in one place. Cloudia’s supplier management solution assists in the management of contractor liability data.

Vastuu Group’s Reliable Partner service automates the acquisition of contractor liability documents and compiles a report that can be integrated into Cloudia’s system. However, not all suppliers are included within the scope of the service, which is why Cloudia’s supplier management system allows for the collection of contractor liability data from those suppliers that are not included in the Reliable Partner report.

The functionality sends a request to the supplier’s email to submit the documents related to contractor liability information. The supplier then provides the documents, which will be made available to Cloudia Supplier Management. After this, the data can be accepted or rejected, and a specific validity can be set for the documents (e.g. valid for 12 months). The status information can be updated directly in Cloudia’s contract management solution to be selected for contracts.

Benefits:

• Easy requesting and management of contractors’ liability data with the supplier management system
• The request leaves a documented trace in the system
• Submitted documents can be evaluated and a validity can be set
• Supplier events can be commented on
• Supplier status is automatically updated to Cloudia Contract

Would you like to hear more about the benefits of combining digital contract management with supplier management? Request a demo!

You should also check out how to improve contract performance with effective change management process.