Sector: Industrial

Customer: One of the largest international on-site services providers

Region: UK

The challenge:

As a leading international on-site services provider, this company works with many thousands of suppliers. Unsurprisingly, managing them can be extremely complex and time consuming. The company needed a simple and efficient way of capturing and analysing data from these suppliers.

The company had a number of prerequisites that its ideal data management system would need. These included providing its supplier governance team with the ability to carry out several checks on each supplier. For example, each time it evaluates a supplier, the team needs to measure compliance with its own CSR policy, and assess the quality and environmental policies of the company in question.

Suppliers must also demonstrate that they have the correct insurance policies in place, as well as appropriate remittance procedures and up-to-date contact information, along with any other general information essential to the management of the supply chain.

The solution:

The company chose the SIM - Supplier Information Management module from Trade Interchange. It provides them with a highly effective data collection tool. This has given the company the ability to efficiently manage and monitor its suppliers’ information from a single well-structured location.

By logging into SIM via its own Supplier Portal hosted by Trade Interchange, the company now has instant online access to all supplier information. The product’s rule-based search capability can pull data and numbers straight from the SIM database, which can then be easily exported into a number of standard formats as part of the reporting and appraisal process.

Being a cloud-based system, the SIM has zero impact on the current IT infrastructure. The supplier governance team also found it simple and quick to install.

The results:

This new solution has allowed the company to assess and approve suppliers based on accurate, up-to-date, information at all times, and has given its procurement teams the resource to carry out efficient supplier information management (SIM) that leaves no stone unturned.

By handing over the responsibility for the accuracy of the data to the suppliers, the system has vastly increased the efficiency of this process. Trade Interchange believes the company has made time saving of more than 500% by using its SIM product.

By basing procurement decisions on more accurate data, the company is also believed to be striking better deals with its suppliers.