3 steps to revolutionize your supply chain management
Many procurement departments today are trying to make the shift from traditional methods of sourcing and managing suppliers, but with a lack of technology in place to enable change, many are still lagging behind. Instead departments continue to solider on with labor-intensive processes to manage everything from tendering and onboarding to contract management and supplier information management.
In this blog, we’ve listed 3 key steps our customer Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) took when faced with the all too familiar issue of overly manual, inefficient supplier management processes.
Step 1: Tiering and segmenting of suppliers
A lack of visibility and management control with suppliers, was a major hurdle for M&B. It was evident there wasn’t a clear view of which suppliers were critical to the business and how they were performing and being managed across the supply chain.
To overcome this hurdle and gain better visibility, M&B began collecting crucial details about its suppliers, ranging from if they were meeting set KPIs and SLAs to the types of goods and services they provided. By gathering and analyzing this data, collated through their Medius Spend Management software, M&B were able to score and segment its supply base into tiers based on; their criticality, how much risk non-performance could put the business at, and if better relationships needed to be developed with certain suppliers.
Following on from the segmentation exercise, M&B setup initiatives and frameworks to improve relationships with suppliers, and allow for two-way feedback and engagement between both parties. This helped drive positive change across they supply base whilst also painting a clearer picture of how each supplier was operating.
Step 2: Standardizing supplier onboarding
Manually onboarding suppliers can become a laborious task for any business, especially if like M&B you have several divisions and need to access the latest information about existing suppliers or want to quickly onboard new suppliers. In order to onboard suppliers faster, M&B standardized its onboarding processes by introducing online Supplier Registration Forms (SRF), the forms capturing core supplier data such as health & safety policies, insurance certificates and key risk metrics. Since the SRF’s were completely flexible, Senior Administrators were able to tailor the forms to ensure they collected the required information.
M&B’s internal users were also able to participate in the process by approving the information submitted by suppliers and allowing them to pass to the next stage, as opposed to manually chasing suppliers for information. Approved data gathered using the SRF’s was then stored against each supplier record, and since all information was captured online, it was easily accessible by the rest of the business. ]
With the option for Senior Administrators to set triggers and alerts for suppliers to renew key information, automatic reminders were sent to M&B’s suppliers prompting them to provide the latest accreditations, further driving compliance and automatic policing of the supplier information. Through standardizing the supplier onboarding cycle and capturing key metrics online, M&B were able to reduce internal administration and onboard suppliers in just a few hours as opposed to 3-4 weeks.
Step 3: Digitizing paper-based supplier contracts
Whilst M&B was benefiting from more control and visibility of the supply chain, the business knew there was an area that still needed to be developed, the management of supplier contracts. M&B was faced with a challenge where they were unable to create, edit, approve and manage contracts in one central location. There was intensive manual resource required to manage and track supplier contracts, given any staff member could be required to manage a contract.
No surprise then that with other responsibilities on their plate some contract renewals slipped through the net. In an attempt to stay on top of contracts and manage them more efficiently, Medius helped M&B transfer all paper-based contracts to a centrally stored online database within Medius Spend Management. By moving all paper-based contracts online it meant the business had complete centralized visibility of contracts, including any that were nearing expiry, and those that had been approved or required updating, providing a full auditable trail of all contract status at any time.
You can read more about Mitchells & Butlers serving up a supply chain revolution with Medius. Or you can get in touch, and we would be happy to speak to you.
