The pandemic changed a lot of things about the way the world operates. While day-to-day operations became difficult, industries around the world came up with new means and methods to keep on functioning. In a situation where people could not leave their houses, digital and technological tools came as a means of salvation.
What would have happened anyway accelerated in a matter of a few months, making our society advance at a rapid rate. This not only brought a change to how we do things, but it also changed various scopes and gave birth to new opportunities.
In regards to that, here in this article, we will focus on one such particular change — vendor management from home. We will discuss the major changes that occurred in this field and what new aspects came to light under the new circumstances. Then, let us quickly go about our way.
How Vendor Management Changed During The Pandemic
Vendor management is the process of dealing with all activities related to the purchasing decisions of a company. This includes selecting and approving suppliers, entering into contracts with approved vendors, managing them, and ensuring that they live up to the agreed expectations of the company.
While vendor management has always been around, recently, it has risen to precise prominence, where people started understanding how important vendor management is. The better you manage your vendors, the better the later outcomes will be.
Vendor management was already getting better tools and aids to increase efficiency and productivity, but due to the pandemic, the upgrade sped up rapidly. As people had to stay back home, Vendor Management Software or VMS rose to prominence.
VMS is a system or software that allows you to effectively manage your vendors and every other related activity through a single centralized platform. Through this software, vendor managers and procurement teams were able to keep functioning even while they were restricted to the boundaries of their homes.
The Role Of Vendor Management Software During The Pandemic
The VMS market started growing rapidly after the start of the pandemic. In 2019, the market was valued closely at 5.21 billion USD and was said to have a steady growth rate ao approximately 13% in the coming few years. This data will give you a brief insight into how rapidly the VMS market is growing, and for good reasons.
During the pandemic, the VMS rose to prominence where it allowed vendor managers to actively manage the vendors of their companies through a centralized platform. While it was a sudden jump from physical and traditional means to a complete online and digital method, the results were excellent.
If anything, the AI and automation features of the software made the procedures much more efficient, organized, simple, and high in productivity. Here are a few prominent features of the VMS to help you understand why it had the effect it did:
Simple procedures for vendor onboarding
Easy and effective tracking features to have an overall view of various vendor status
Highly collaborative functions such as self-service portals to ease collaboration efforts and increase efficiency and save time
Easy access to vendor data, allowing for critical reviews and changes
As you can see, all these features allowed you full control of your vendor management, even if you were unable to step out of your house. It allowed you to operate in the same manner, with better results even when you could not physically carry out the tasks.
Along with VMS, other useful tools made it easier for vendor management teams to keep at their work even during lockdowns. Various online conference and video calling tools allowed managers to seamlessly stay in touch with vendors, where all meetings and conferences started being online.
There were also major changes to the numerous procedures as more and more digital tools started making their way into the workflow. Even if no one could go to the office, cloud storage, IoTs, and so on allowed team members to stay in touch with each other to carry out operations and projects.
Vendor Management From Home — Roles And Responsibilities
During the pandemic, when offices were closed down, vendor managers, along with other personnel, had to come up with their own rules and regulations to operate systematically. Here are a few roles and responsibilities that vendor managers and other teams members had to abide by to successfully keep working even from home:
Abiding by common ground rules and regulations set up by the company to ensure the safety of company data
To make sure that you have the right equipment and tools to work from home without any hassles
Setting up a make-do office space in your house to ensure full concentration and focus on work
Learn to correctly use the right phone application, software, and other tools
The pandemic saw a lot of changes in the various industries across the globe. While the vendor management industry requires a lot of on-site actions, thanks to VMS and other tools, companies were able to make great progress in this field.
There are times that you need to put a vendor out of business, which means leaving a vendor to get products from someone else. There can be various reasons why you need to put a vendor out of business, like the vendor not delivering on time, the vendors not following certain rules of your company, or you have evolved out of your vendors.
The following article highlights how you can lay off a vendor easily and the things you need to consider before doing so. Putting certain vendors out of business is very necessary; otherwise, you can suffer losses that can be difficult to pay off.
Get involved before signing contracts
Before you lay off a vendor from their work, it is important to know whether or not you have some other ways of making them aware of their poor performance. You can check to see if they have a website or an online community. This also goes for the vendors you are aiming to keep in the loop after putting your existing vendor out of business. You need to get involved with new suppliers after putting the existing ones out of business so that you have a variety of vendors to choose from.
Gaining real hands-on experience is very necessary to know more about the vendor, the service and the goods they provide, and their feasibility for your business. Before getting new people to contribute to your business, you must get to know them; otherwise, you may experience regret for not choosing well while being misinformed due to third-party opinion. Once you choose a new vendor and lay off the old one, there is no going back for a while. Think of long term business plans
Some vendors might be performing poorly due to a clash of opinions. What does that mean? It means that they might not be the right choice for you anymore, as you have evolved as a business. If you were initially a small business and have now been acquired by a larger company or have outgrown your initial need for produce and products, you cannot keep on working with the same supplier.
Due to this, you might now need a bigger supplier who is a part of a conglomerate and can provide you with bulk materials. So, you are expected to go with a new supplier, who can fulfill these needs, and fulfill them on time. There can be times when you cannot deal with the supplier’s increasing product costs because they are outgrowing you. In such a case, too, you need to take care of supplier migration.
Check your vendor management chain
You need to inform the top brass about the change. Just because you have made the decision to change the vendor doesn’t mean the decision will always get approved. There are various formalities that need to be done before putting a certain vendor out of business, which can only be taken care of after you have received permission from the higher-ups. For example, you need to inform the head of sales that a certain vendor isn’t delivering on time and needs to be immediately replaced due to the losses they are causing to the business.
There can be times when things go wrong. In such cases, if you have informed the management regarding the decision, you don’t need to worry about the technicalities; your company’s lawyers will take care of the necessary work. Sometimes, vendors understand why they are being replaced, but there can be times when a huge ruckus is caused. To curb this, proper communication in the company is required.
How easily can you migrate
The ease of migration is a major factor that plays a role in the vendor replacement process. You need to know how easily you can switch the places from where you acquire your products, how long the lag time is (lag time refers to the time it takes the product to come to you from the supplier), and what is the drop in the product quality (if any). After making these decisions, you can safely migrate from one vendor to the other.
You also need to note how well these vendors can be incorporated into your company. A certain vendor might be giving you trouble due to their attitude, but would be performing well in the company, so replacing them won’t be as feasible. There are various such factors to consider before migrating to a better vendor.
Conclusion
In conclusion, these are the things you need to consider before replacing a vendor with a new one. Replacing vendors is a drastic measure you take if no other option is working. Hopefully, this article helped to resolve the trouble you are facing in your company regarding vendors, vendor replacement, and any such related issues.
Vendors are one of the most essential parts of a business; meetings with them are necessary to plan the future of your venture. However, times are uncertain, which means situations can go either way. You need to be prepared for all cases, considering the pandemic has had various peaks. There are other factors like your vendor’s location from your headquarters and the money invested in the product you are buying from the vendor.
Businesspeople discussing business on virtual staff meeting during pandemic
Making preparations for all kinds of situations entails various procedures to take care of; you need to adjust for both online and offline meetings.
Offline meetings (Why it is a good option)
Offline meetings sound like a myth, or to an extent, a thing of the distant past, don’t they? With the signs of a receding pandemic, people are getting a bit more daring to conduct offline meetings (although with proper precautions). There are many ways in which you can prepare for offline meetings, and it is good for your business in a plethora of ways.
In an offline meeting, the chance of a communication gap to occur is absolutely minimal; the conversation includes a great deal of body language and how the other person is responding to your proposals. You can shake on certain deals and get your vendors to sign on these deals on the spot. You can expect your expectations to be met and make sure that these products reach you on time.
Offline meetings also have a certain feel to them that can’t be sated by any other form of communication. Once you communicate something face-to-face, you know that you have said your piece properly and have the right to wait for any kind of doubt or wait for the right product to arrive at your doorstep.
Things to take care of for offline meetings
With the ongoing pandemic, there are many things to take care of, like how people behave in a heated discussion. The fact that there needs to be a certain amount of social distancing remains true, while also that the vendor and the buyer need to wear masks for the duration of the meeting and en route to the meeting. All this needs to be taken care of while keeping in mind that the embers of the virus still exist, waiting for a chance to create a wildfire.
Proper sanitization of all facilities is also very necessary so that in the off chance that there is any existing, it gets eliminated right then and there. This procedure should be done regardless of whether meetings have to be held in the room or not; if you are using your office facilities, it should be a safe space for all the employees. This way, you can avoid any potential cases in your office.
Online meetings (Why they are good)
Online meetings are very user-friendly; you can have them for however long you want while sitting in the comfort of your house. They are a method to stay away from people while also staying close to them. There are a plethora of ways in which you can hold an online meeting; you can hold it over a conference call or over any application that provides online meeting facilities. There are various ways in these applications, too; you can create breakout rooms, you can separate people for some specific tasks.
They are easy to manage when there are fewer people. You can mute and unmute people and manage the disturbance that might be caused in this meeting. It also automatically takes care of social distancing and maintaining any form of covid protocols. Online meetings are definitely the way to go if things go wrong.
Things to take care of for online meetings
There are various things you need to take care of for an online meeting. The first precaution is the fact that you have a stable and strong Internet connection. If you want to have a meaningful conversation over the Internet, the requirement of a good connection is a necessity, and without it, these applications are meaningless. The fact of the matter is that even if you want to do some deal over a conference call, you need to have a good connection. To implement this, you need to buy a good plan for your home (or your office, wherever you will get your meetings done.)
Another thing to keep in mind is the decorum that has to be maintained during an online meeting. While it is not always the case that there will be chaos, you shouldn’t take any chances with these important meetings.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you should be ready no matter how situations turn out. Online or offline, these things should be taken care of as swiftly as possible. Necessary precautions need to be taken, but take care of how the pandemic turns out.
Top 5 skills needed for successful vendor management
Managing vendors is as important as managing inventory in a business. As a matter of fact, both of these are closely interlinked, considering vendors are the people that help you fill out your inventory. That would be going off on a tangent, though, considering this article is going to talk about the top skills you require to be a cream-of-the-crop vendor manager.
If you are looking for a job in this field, you need to be aware of the skills that people hiring you will be trying to find in you. This article is a guide to tell you which skills you need to polish to shine brightest amongst all other candidates.
Strong verbal and written communication
Communication is the key to success. Be it communicating with the higher-ups in the business about the material that has been sourced, asking them what they need moving forward, or be it communicating with the vendor regarding the required supplies; the vendor manager needs to be adept in all these areas. They need to reprimand the vendors verbally (and in writing if need be) if they fail to comply with the standards set for them or fail to deliver good quality supplies.
The same goes for communicating with your higher-ups. There can be times when the inventory faces losses in supplies due to poor management; you need to cover that with your vendors. This is why a vendor manager needs to be adept at communication, inventory is one of the most fickle elements of a business, one of the most important too, and vendors keep your inventory running.
Negotiation
Negotiating is a part of communication too. In fact, all the other skills except the last one are a niche variation of your communication skills. There can be instances where the vendors are overpricing a material. In such a case, you need to realize that the actual price is way lower and start negotiating. Negotiating is a skill that is not often found in people; it needs certain crookedness (in a good way). It also needs a good understanding of the market and the commercial environment, which is not found in everyone either.
There can also be times when a supplier is providing you with good supplies, but his prices are exceeding your allotted budget. In such a case, you’ll need to negotiate too, either with the vendor to lower the prices a bit or your higher-ups to increase the allotted budget. Both the situations need a lot of convincing that needs to be done. It’s not an easy task by any means. However, the action of convincing brings us to our next point: Marketing skills.
Marketing Skills
Marketing skills require a great deal of convincing. However, you might be wondering how marketing is even remotely related to a job that doesn’t deal with customers. Well, imagine a scenario where you got a job in a company that has just started its production. You need to bring suppliers to your company that has just started making its name in the market; you need to market your company to the suppliers. Such are the skills required for a vendor manager to source the materials for the business.
You also need to convince the higher-ups in the business as to what vendor you need to choose. It’s your decision to make, but it should be concordant with your superior’s choices. (The statement’s contradictory, but you get a chance to explain why a certain vendor is better than the other.)
Assertiveness
You need to be assertive. If you need to convince someone, it’s rarely possible with an easygoing attitude, especially when money or any form of transaction is involved. If you need to negotiate, you need to stay on your price; if you are marketing to a vendor, you need to be sure of the decision, so on. An assertive personality is key to being able to communicate successfully with the vendors without a hitch and getting them to perform as well as they are supposed to (or even better).
Decision-making skills
Making important decisions is core to any post, not just a vendor manager. The question, however, that arises is what are the important decisions you have to make as a vendor manager? To list out a few, here are some of them:
What are the supplies that are required by the business? Is the vendor supplying the right quality of materials?
Is the amount supplied by the vendor sufficient? If not, how do you increase the number of supplies while keeping the rate the same, if not lower?
If the supplier is not responding properly, how do you approach them? Are there certain reasons that make a supplier incompatible with your business?
Such decisions greatly impact the business, so the quality of making them at a moment’s notice with prior knowledge and research is essential.
The new version of WFR ( AP Project 2803) has been released and it contains a slew of new features that will have customers wanting to upgrade. The project still comes with its industry-standard set of pre-trained layouts that allow for automatic extraction of anything from invoices to purchase orders but has gone much further. In an effort to increase the level of security, a large number of INI file configurations have been removed from a plain text file that would sit out on the Windows server and instead have been pushed to the database. In that same vein, all of the passwords related to the AP project can now be encrypted and are no longer visible to anyone with access to the WFR server.
To support the new database INI file configuration, a new Solution Configuration Manager(SCM) has been created. SCM is a web-based application that can be accessed from any browser and makes the process of updating configurations a breeze. In addition, user management is now handled through the SCM tool negating the need to provision server access for a user access management team. All configuration changes made through the SCM tool are saved to the database and can be easily transferred between instances.
New Project Fields
Client IDs – Out of the box, WFR comes pre configured with a single client. Whenever documents pass through the system, they are preassigned a Client ID. Client IDs control the overall workflow of a document including:
Extracted document fields.
Mandatory and optional fields, and their corresponding validation rules.
The data sources that are used for field validation.
How data is exported.
Examples of how this can be utilized:
If the end-user is a BPO, a client can be used to represent a single customer of the BPO or a division of a single customer.
If you have one user working in multiple regions or with multiple divisions with their own requirements, a client can be used to represent each region or division.
If you have one user working with multiple ERP systems, each ERP system can be set up as an individual client for the different ERP-system connections and processing rules.
New Fields in AP Project
VAT Table: You can use the VAT table in place of the single AmountTax field to capture a greater level of tax detail from European VAT invoices.
Delivery Notes: This field is a line item type field where multiple delivery notes are captured and entered.
IBAN: It represents the international bank account number for invoice payment.
BIC: It is an internationally assigned code to identify a unique banking institution.
Your Ref: Use this field to capture a reference number specified on the invoice that relates to the party being billed. It can often consist of a contact name, a reference number, or a combination of both
Alternate Payee/Alternate Payee Address: The alternate payee field is a supplementary field to the Vendor ID and represents the party to whom actual invoice payments should be made
Mexican UUID: The Mexican UUID is an electronic invoice number provided by the Mexican SAT authorities and appears as standard on electronic documents.
Dynamic Form – A new dynamic web form is available for use with all of the default fields. This is viewable from Verifier Design Mode.
New Features
Scripting – Added new field validation user exits UserExitAccountNumberValidate and UserExitEmployeeIDValidate. The user exit UserExitFilterEmployeeSearch is now available for filtering the Employee ASE results. For line pairing, a new user exit UserExitPreLinePairing has also been added.
General Extraction – Added the ability to extract multiple VAT rates and amounts. AP Project can now extract up to three different VAT rates and amounts from VAT related invoices. Ability to handle non-numeric purchase order line item numbers.
Material Line Pairing – A new user exit UserExitRejectPOForLinePairing is added to allow a user to reject a purchase order for line pairing based upon custom criteria. This criteria can include data contained within the purchase order header, such as the vendor ID. Enhanced the line pairing algorithm so that pricing data is brought in to help distinguish between lines with the near-identical descriptions that fail the distance check.
Material Line Pairing – Added a new user exit UserExitRejectPOForLinePairing to allow a user to reject a purchase order for line pairing based upon custom criteria. This criteria can include data contained within the purchase order header, such as the vendor ID.
Enhanced the line pairing algorithm so that pricing data is brought in to help distinguish between lines that fail the distance check with the near identical descriptions.
Extraction/ Configuration/ Validation – Reinforced VAT rate validation is now configurable. VAT rate charged on the invoice can be validated against a country list to ensure that VAT extraction is valid. A database is added for mapping the country code to the VAT table. When the VAT rate is validated, AP Project verifies that the value of VAT and the country relevant to the invoice match with the corresponding database values.
A new export option is added to output an XML file containing the document OCR words, fields, and table data including positional information for use within a third party Verifier application. The field candidate information can also be included on an optional basis. The user exit UserExitOCRXMLOutput is also added to enable custom development.
Enhanced the automatic extraction for the purchase order number field to increase the extraction rate on US & UK documents where the PO is of a less distinct format, such as a numeric string of 4 or 5 characters in length.
Support for Golden Tax solution mandated for domestic transactions that involve VAT in mainland China.
Added a new field MexicanUUID to support automatic extraction of the UUID number that appears on Mexican electronic invoices – a new user exit UserExitMexicanUUIDValidate has also been added to support custom validations for this field.
Extraction Configuration –Multi-tenanted automatic extraction feature is now added for custom fields (Custom1 to Custom5) within the project. This enables a developer to set up analysis, evaluation, and extraction profiles within the AP Project database. These profiles automatically extract bespoke fields on a client-by-client basis. For example, field Custom1 can be configured to extract a store number for customer profile 1, but an order date for customer profile 2. This is not possible if the traditional AP Project engines are used.
Validation / Configuration –Added a new configuration option AlwaysUsePOVendorSiteID to the BRWVND table, which, if activated, forces the usage of the site ID on the purchase order header, rather than using the value returned by the ASE engine.
A new configuration option is added for the invoice number validation. So, if the history check is activated, the extracted candidate is always marked invalid if its weight does not surpass a minimum weighting entered as the value of the InvoiceNumberConfidence parameter in the BRWNUM table. Formatting Added support for formatting of Taiwanese dates (e.g. 104/09/19 will now be formatted to 19/09/2015).
Reporting / Configuration – Invoice line item reporting feature – upon export, the system writes the line item data into the reporting database tables. This can be switched on and off using the INI file setting ActivateLineItemReporting.
Why Upgrade?
While upgrading to the newest version comes with the obvious advantages of bringing all of your software to the current supported versions, there are a few features that are must-haves for any client.
VAT – The VAT enhancements made in Project 2803 make this newer version of WFR a necessity if your company receives any European invoices as the complexity of the taxes on these invoices can now be captured correctly.
User management – The switch to a browser based user management model increases your company’s security by removing the need to provision access to secure servers.
Multi-tenant – The addition of client id provides the required flexibility for large complex organizations that have several projects and would like to simplify their process to flow through one managed server.
Security – The ability to further secure your WFR server by encrypting the DB credentials provides the infrastructure team peace of mind.
Patch Set – Upgrading to 2803 will bring your company up to date and ensure that you are able to continue receiving support from Oracle.
Upgrade Path
When upgrading from 11.1.1.8, there are a few different options that can be utilized when upgrading your WFR server.
Option Number 1:
Clone your existing 2008 R2 Production machine.
On the cloned system, upgrade the WFR 11.1.1.8 installation to 11.1.1.9 by following the 11.1.1.9 WFR Migration Guide and Project Migration Guide document.
Upgrade the cloned system’s OS to Windows 2012 R2.
Upgrade the cloned system’s WFR 11.1.1.9 installation to 12c.
Option Number 2:
Create a new Windows 2008 R2 Server.
Clone the production WFR installation onto the new 2008 R2 system using the steps in Document 2264982.1 – How to Clone a WebCenter Forms Recognition Environment.
On the cloned system, upgrade WFR 11.1.1.8 installation to 11.1.1.9 following the 11.1.1.9 WFR Migration Guide and Project Migration Guide documents.
Upgrade the new system’s OS to Windows 2012 R2.
Upgrade the cloned system’s WFR 11.1.1.9 installation to 12c.
The upgrade from 11.1.1.9 is detailed below:
Migration of the AP Packaged Project 1007G to AP Packaged Project 2803 MUST be performed with the Solution Migration Tool. This is the only supported method to migrate the project to version 2803. Its purpose is to ensure all scripting is correct and located in the proper section of the project.
Once the migration is completed, the core application of WFR can be upgraded. This is described in detail in the Oracle WFR Migration Guide, 12.2.1.4, dated September 2019, (available with the Install Package downloadable for the Oracle CLOUD e Delivery site).
Lessons Learned
There were a number of challenges that oApps faced when implementing the new AP Project 2803 that required a few weeks of additional research and implementation time in order to root out.
User Management – The user management module was completely moved out of the Designer application and into the SCM where users are synced via an RTS job.
Data Export – Oracle dropped some of the seeded export date formats and both SCM as well as IPM had to be modified in order to accommodate the different date formats.
Material Number Formats – With the push of the INI file to the database, there were additional limitations added to the material numbers that required database modifications in order to function properly.
Solution Configuration Manager(SCM) – The new web application came with a number of unique challenges regarding the software needed in order to install the app to the IIS server. After installing the software prerequisites, some of the software had to be further modified in order to include components that did not get installed as a part of the base. In addition, the WFR boxes did not have all of the required drivers to run the SCM application.
INI File Move to DB – The move of the INI file to the database took additional time to re-learn. Any seasoned WFR developer will need additional time to get up to speed on the new way to update INI file values, the new front-end names of these values and how to migrate settings between instances.
Customer Case Study
Client: Electronics Company with $25+ billion in sales that develop technology solutions that improve business and daily life.
Clients Challenge(s): The client needed to be brought on to the most current version of the WFR software as there were features in 2803 that would resolve current issues they were experiencing and Oracle would no longer support their current implementation. In addition, the client had 4 different WFR boxes that were running on different versions of the software that they wanted to standardize on a single version of WFR.
Solution: oApps determined the correct upgrade path for each of the respective WFR versions. Upgrades were performed in place and each project was run through the solution migration tool.
Quote: “oAppsNET did a great job with the upgrade”
Justin Rhoades
Oracle Financial Functional Consultant
Justin Rhoades is an Oracle Solution consultant with over 12+ years of experience in the Oracle Financial space. He specializes in WebCenter integrations and has extensive knowledge in global implementations, Support, and Training. Justin brings a mix of functional and technical experience to deliver optimum solutions to solving complex business requirements.
Justin most recent work included an upgrade of Oracle WebCenter at a large Energy Distribution Company. Justin played a key role in delivering new functionality of the upgraded version, ensuring that any customization continued to function in the release and performed training and documentation on the functionality.
Looking to upgrade? Contact oApps to set up a consultation.
