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Having a slow supplier onboarding process is an issue for many businesses today.
There’s a desperate need for greater business agility to effectively respond to market changes. But how do businesses achieve greater agility in their supply chain?
In this blog, we uncover how organisations can achieve effective supplier network management including a focused case study. Read below to discover how your business can optimise the onboarding of new suppliers to your trading network.
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The need for a new supplier onboarding process
We touched on the need for greater business agility in the intro to this blog, but we need to delve into it further.
Unsurprisingly, the need for an efficient supplier onboarding process comes as a result of recent events. The combination of the pandemic, Brexit, and international wars have hindered supply chains across most industries. Organisations with previously solid global supply networks were thrown into disarray due to product shortages, increased bureaucracy, or logistical issues.
Businesses also increasingly need flexibility in their supply chain to onboard new suppliers that have market proximity. This ensures they can rapidly respond to changing demand from both Direct to Consumer (D2C) and other sales channels.
Despite all of this, organisations are still struggling with inefficient supplier onboarding processes. In fact, a survey carried out by Transalis in 2020 identified that onboarding a non-domestic supplier took an average of three months.
This is a huge barrier for organisations needing a responsive and agile supply chain.
Optimising the supplier onboarding process in practice
We executed a plan to tackle this issue for one of our clients to support them as they expanded their European market share.
The client, a manufacturer of licenced pop collectable toys, harnessed Transalis eDI™ to optimise the management of a localised supply chain. This strategy placed product closer to the relevant markets and therefore eliminated the delays in transferring product across borders.
Working with the client, Transalis implemented an automated EDI solution that transformed the supply chain in three critical areas:
Onboarding of new suppliers within 24 hours, facilitating greater flexibility to react rapidly to market needs
Automation of manual warehousing processes, for scalable and efficient product allocation and delivery
Removal of cross-border delays, with satellite distribution hubs for closer proximity to the given market
Transalis hosted a white-label version of eDI Instant to optimise the new supplier onboarding process. This included pre-configured mapping, so the new supplier could sign-up online and exchange EDI messages with the client within 24-hours.
This solution combined the use of systems integration, narrow AI and expanded EDI messaging to provide frictionless supply chain management. This was achieved through efficient communications and connectivity between the client’s warehouse, 3PL operation, suppliers, and customers.
Enable an optimised supplier onboarding process with eDI Instant
Leveraging faster supplier onboarding processes brings flexibility and scale to a business’s supply chain, ensuring the right suppliers are available to serve the right products at the right time to meet changing consumer demand.
To improve the speed of onboarding, we recommend our clients enable their suppliers to connect via Transalis eDI Instant™. As the name suggests, by automating the EDI configuration process, we have reduced the typical onboarding time in the industry from months to as little as 24 hours for most connections.
Transalis eDI Instant™ can be provided as a white-label, fully managed solution to make the onboarding process even more efficient. This means that clients can simply direct new suppliers to their own branded version of eDI Instant. The new supplier can then complete the enrolment process and be efficiently onboarded to the client’s supply network.
eDI Software
eDI Freedom
Build your own bespoke EDI solution according to your supply chain & integration needs
eDI Connect
Ideal for companies with many trading network, high order volumes, requiring enhanced stock & sales reporting
eDI Connect+
Perfect for larger organisations requiring complete visibility across their supply chain to improve efficiencies
To find out more about our white label solution of eDI Instant, please contact our dedicated team on 0845 123 3746 (UK callers) or +44 1978 369 343 (international callers), or via email on sales@transalis.com. We have plenty of other insightful articles, reports and case studies in our Knowledge Hub.