Category: vendor onboarding

Best Practices to Optimize Supplier Onboarding in Hospitals

You know how time-consuming and tedious supplier onboarding can be for hospitals and healthcare systems. According to the Institute for Supply Management, the average time for onboarding suppliers for large organizations is roughly six months; chances are your organization would find that amount of time for onboarding unacceptable.

With constant pressures to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, you need a streamlined process to get new vendors up and running as quickly as possible.

At the same time, you have to ensure you’re meeting all the necessary compliance and regulatory requirements. It’s a tricky balance, but follow these best practices and you’ll have a supplier onboarding process that’s optimized for success.

First, centralize and standardize the steps involved, from initial contact through contracting and beyond. Make use of automation where you can to reduce repetitive manual work. And most importantly, communicate frequently with your new vendors to make sure there are no surprises on either side. If done right, supplier onboarding doesn’t have to be a hassle – it can be an opportunity to build strong, long-term partnerships that benefit both parties. With the tips in this article, you’ll be onboarding new suppliers efficiently and effectively in no time.

The Importance of Vendor Onboarding for Hospitals

Vendor onboarding is key to optimizing your supply chain and ensuring high-quality patient care. As a hospital, you have a lot riding on choosing the right suppliers and properly onboarding them.

Streamline Processes

Well-designed onboarding processes reduce costs and increase efficiency. By automating paperwork and digitizing records, you’ll save time and money. Electronic portals where vendors can upload required documents and fill out information in a standardized format are ideal.

Mitigate Risks

Proper onboarding mitigates risks to patients, staff, and your organization. Checking credentials, certifications, and compliance helps avoid issues down the road. Be sure new vendors understand and agree to your hospital’s values, standards, and policies in writing. Conduct site visits when possible to evaluate operations in person.

Ensure Safety and Quality

Onboarding impacts patient safety, so scrutinize new vendors thoroughly. Review service histories, talk to references, and evaluate product or service quality. Once onboard, conduct periodic re-evaluations to make sure standards don’t slip. Patient well-being depends on the integrity of your supply chain.

Build Partnerships

A good onboarding process sets the foundation for a long and productive partnership. Take time to understand new vendors’ capabilities and limitations to find the right fit for your needs. Explain your hospital’s priorities and constraints as well so vendors know how to best support your mission. Open communication and transparency build trust in the relationship.

With mindful onboarding of valued partners, you’ll gain a secure, cost-effective, and high-quality supply chain—and provide the best care for your patients. Isn’t that the most important goal?

Steps for Streamlining Supplier Onboarding Processes

Streamlining your supplier onboarding process can save time, reduce costs, and get new vendors up and running as efficiently as possible. Here are some steps to optimize your hospital’s supplier onboarding:

Assign a dedicated point person to manage the onboarding checklist for each new supplier. This helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks and provides the vendor with a single contact to guide them through the process.
Automate whatever parts of the process you can. Things like online forms, e-signatures, and automated email reminders can speed up steps like contract signing, compliance documentation, and scheduling orientations.
Create a clear communication plan. Meet with the key stakeholders early on to define objectives, priorities, and metrics for success. Put the plan in writing and share it with the new vendor so everyone is on the same page from the beginning.
If onboarding happens in person, designate a physical space for the vendor to work during onboarding. Providing office space, a desk, and network access helps the vendor get up to speed and gives them a home base as they learn about your organization.
Schedule a vendor orientation and initial training. Walking the vendor through your facilities, systems, and processes helps them integrate into your operations as smoothly as possible. Orientations should include key policies, contacts, and next steps.

With efficient planning and leveraging available technologies, streamlining your supplier onboarding is absolutely achievable. Following these best practices will ensure your new vendors get up to speed quickly so you can focus on what really matters – providing the best care for your patients.

Leveraging Technology to Automate Onboarding Tasks

Leveraging technology for supplier onboarding in hospitals is key to streamlining the process and reducing manual work for employees. Automating repetitive tasks frees up staff to focus on high-value work.

Utilize a Self-Service Onboarding Portal

Allowing vendors to fill in their own information when it’s most convenient for them saves your team from having to chase down documents or search the internet for any information that’s missing. Self-service portals also allow suppliers and vendors to update their information whenever anything changes, which means your supplier data is more accurate and useful. Onboarding portals like SupplierGateway’s portal can be customized to suit the various supplier types your hospital system utilizes, which means the onboarding experience is specific to the vendor type onboarding, making the process of filling out documentation much faster.

Automate Data Entry

To save suppliers even more time during the onboarding process, SupplierGATEWAY’s Onboarding software can automatically populate electronic forms with information from the vendor profile. Fields like contact details, tax IDs, and payment terms only need to be entered once. The data is then synced across all relevant systems. This reduces duplicate data entry, saves your vendors time during onboarding, and ensures consistency across all your systems.

Digital Document Signing

Having suppliers physically sign multiple copies of agreements and send them back is time-consuming. Electronic signature solutions let you send documents for e-signature directly from your onboarding platform. Vendors can review and sign anywhere, speeding up the contract finalization process. Digitally signed documents are automatically filed in the appropriate systems.

Seamless Communication

Onboarding software enhances communication between departments by centralizing supplier information and documents in one place. Stakeholders from IT, finance, and legal have visibility into the onboarding progress and can pick up where others left off. Email notifications alert teams when it’s their turn to review and approve. This level of connectivity drives efficiency and reduces the time it takes to onboard new suppliers.

Increased Compliance

Automated workflows ensure all necessary steps are completed in the proper order. Checklists prompt teams with required approvals and documents at each stage of onboarding. Automated validations catch errors and incomplete information early on. By systemizing and standardizing processes, hospitals can onboard vendors compliantly and confidently.

Leveraging onboarding technology for hospitals reduces tedious work, mitigates errors, enhances compliance, and increases connectivity between teams. While initial investment may be needed, the long-term gains in productivity and efficiency make the business case for automation software quite compelling. The future of vendor onboarding is digital, automated, and optimized.

Building Strong Supplier Relationships Through Onboarding

Building strong relationships with your suppliers is key to optimizing the onboarding process. Foster open communication and set clear expectations from the start.

Meet Regularly

Schedule recurring meetings with vendors during onboarding and beyond. This allows you to address any questions or concerns, provide feedback, and make sure you’re both on the same page regarding the next steps. Meeting regularly, whether weekly or monthly, establishes a collaborative partnership and builds trust.

Share Key Documents

Provide vendors with any policies, procedures, or other materials they need to understand to properly onboard. This includes things like:

Code of conduct
Compliance documentation
Standard operating procedures
Key performance indicators or service level agreements

Supplying this information upfront eliminates confusion and helps vendors meet your requirements and key performance targets. Brief them on any changes to documents or processes as well.

Designate a Main Point of Contact

Assign a primary contact person for vendors to direct questions to during onboarding. This single point of contact allows for clear, consistent communication and helps vendors get the information they need in an efficient manner. The main contact should be thoroughly versed in the organization’s vendor management program and able to address any issues. Consider a backup contact as well in case the primary contact is unavailable.

Evaluate and Provide Feedback

Review vendor progress and performance regularly, especially in the initial onboarding period. Offer constructive feedback and suggestions for improvement. Be open to feedback from vendors as well on ways you can strengthen the relationship or improve your internal processes. Continuous evaluation and feedback helps to ensure vendors meet key milestones and make necessary adjustments. It also reinforces your commitment to partnership and collaboration.

Maintaining open lines of communication, providing the resources and information vendors need, designating key contacts, and giving constructive feedback are best practices for developing valuable, long-term relationships with suppliers. Strong partnerships built on mutual understanding and trust will optimize the onboarding experience for both parties.

Measuring and Improving Onboarding Programs Over Time

Once you have an onboarding program in place, you need to determine whether it’s achieving the desired results. Measuring key metrics over time can help assess the effectiveness of your onboarding and identify areas for improvement.

Time to Complete Onboarding

Track how long it takes vendors to become fully onboarded. If it’s taking longer than expected, your onboarding may need strengthening. Consider further segmenting your supplier types to tailor the onboarding experience more explicitly, and increase communication via check-ins with the supplier during the onboarding process.

Feedback and Surveys

Survey new vendors at 30, 60, and 90 days to get their input on the onboarding experience. Ask how long it took them to complete the process, what could be improved, and their level of satisfaction. Look for trends in the feedback and make adjustments to your program.

Continuous Improvement

Review metrics and feedback regularly and update your onboarding program every 6-12 months. Keep what’s working, and revise or replace what’s not. Onboarding should be an evolving process that adapts to changes according to your organization’s needs as well as your vendor’s needs. With ongoing measurement and refinement, you can optimize your program to achieve maximum results.

Conclusion

By focusing on streamlining your onboarding workflows, providing thorough training, maintaining open communication, and building solid relationships, you’ll be well on your way to mitigating risks, reducing costs, and improving patient care through high-quality vendor partnerships.

The time you invest upfront in onboarding new suppliers will pay off hugely down the road. While change can be challenging, viewing suppliers as collaborators in care will help make the transition as seamless as possible. Keep at it and before you know it, you’ll have built a network of trusted partners helping your hospital operate at its best. The patients and community you serve will reap the benefits.

Onboard New Suppliers Faster and with Less Risk with These Five Supplier Onboarding Tips

Without vendors and suppliers, most businesses wouldn’t be able to function from day to day. Whether suppliers are responsible for raw materials needed to produce finished goods or supplying essential services necessary for company operations, the importance of suppliers necessitates building strong and secure relationships.

Minimizing vendor and supplier risk and ensuring long, strong relationships is more than just finding the best suppliers. According to Deloitte, 60% of CPOs cite poor data quality, standardization of practices, and governance as the largest procurement problem they face. Having a standardized supplier onboarding process helps increase accurate supplier data capture and quality. Inefficient onboarding processes not only slow your company’s time to market and increase your company’s exposure to undue risk, but also reinforce lack of transparency as a norm for your suppliers.

Your company’s onboarding process sets the stage for all of your supplier relationships. Efficient and accurate onboarding processes ensure suppliers are aware of and agree to your transparency and communications expectations. Standardized onboarding practices allow suppliers to become partners in data security and transparency. Efficient and transparent onboarding enables positive supplier relationships and helps reduce your company’s exposure to risk.

While risk reduction is a top priority for over 90% of CPOs, poor supply chain transparency leaves a significant number of procurement officers with little to no knowledge of risk beyond their tier 1 suppliers. Lack of supply chain transparency also affects the end customer as well. Over 60% of consumers will not purchase from a company that they do not trust. If your supply chain has low levels of transparency, there are few tools available to use to gain consumer trust.

Adopting best practices for vendor and supplier onboarding will help you create a process that lays a strong foundation for your supplier relationships and ultimately increase profitability while reducing risk for your company.

What is Supplier Onboarding?

Supplier onboarding, or vendor onboarding, which is part of supplier relationship management, is a process that allows organizations to efficiently vet, qualify, approve, and contract vendors so that goods or services can be purchased, and make timely payments to current and new supply partners.

While many onboarding processes are similar, organizations may go about them in different ways. The process can either be paper-based or digital, managed via the buyer or self-directed by the supplier. Supplier onboarding isn’t that different from new employee onboarding.

A well-designed supplier onboarding process helps your company avoid potentially expensive mistakes, including avoiding risks that could put your organization in legal, reputational, or compliance trouble.

The Supplier Onboarding Process

In this article, supplier onboarding is broken down into five steps:

Identify the need for a new supplier according to procurement requirements. Any new supplier onboarding exercise is triggered by a need identified by procurement.
Identify potential suppliers and evaluate them. During this process, your organization should gather data pertaining to service record, reputation, credit history, and regulatory, financial, and legal compliance.
Qualify suppliers. Once a supplier has been evaluated, your company should use a predetermined qualification process to qualify (or disqualify) a potential supplier. The qualification process should reflect your company’s policies regarding lead times, pricing, ESG credentials, and terms and conditions. Suppliers that do not pass your company’s qualification process should be removed from consideration while those that pass the qualification process can be approved.
Collect supplier information. Your organization should collect supplier information either via a buyer-led process or through a self-service portal. Using self-service portals is considered best practice and saves buyers and suppliers a considerable amount of time. Your company will need to collect different types of information, including payment details. You’ll also want to ensure that suppliers have access to any necessary systems, and that internal stakeholders have access to supplier information.
Regularly review supplier performance. Supplier performance should be assessed on a regular basis after onboarding. This ensures the onboarding process has been completed and ensures that suppliers are always meeting company procurement standards and requirements in the future.

Supplier Onboarding Best Practices

In practice, supplier onboarding is often an inefficient, time-consuming process that can often take months to complete. Luckily, there are many steps your organization can take to optimize the onboarding process. By adopting best practices, you can streamline vendor selection, speed up the onboarding process itself, and ensure new relationships with vendors have the best chance at success.

Take due diligence seriously. Spending additional time on the supplier selection process can ultimately save you time by removing unfit suppliers sooner rather than later. Pay particular attention to reputational risk, financial information and risk, insurance information, and the supplier’s information/data security measures.
Prioritize data security. Keeping supplier data safe is crucial, so it’s important to invest in systems that keep your supplier information and data protected from threats. A paperless supplier information management system will help you protect this incredibly valuable information.
Get leadership buy-in ASAP. Having leadership buy-in early on is essential when creating a supplier onboarding process. Make sure all necessary stakeholders are involved in the process from the beginning. Getting buy-in from leadership ensures that your entire organization uses and understands the process, thus driving success in onboarding.
Be consistent in your approach. Make sure that your onboarding process is used company-wide. Consistent use means consistent results, but your care and attention shouldn’t stop after the onboarding process is finished. Ongoing supplier management brings about additional benefits for your business, like better time to market, supplier innovation, and more.
Automate when possible. Traditionally, onboarding processes can be time-intensive, labor-intensive, and costly. According to Informatica, businesses who automate part or most of their supplier onboarding processes spend up to 80% less time onboarding new suppliers. Using automation tools whenever possible allows for greater accuracy and efficiency when obtaining necessary information. You can maximize onboarding efficiency by establishing a self-service portal where suppliers can enter in their own data.

Key Benefits of Strategic Supplier Onboarding

Developing a strong and well-managed supplier onboarding process helps your organization create an efficient and effective supplier relationship management program. A clear, efficient, and easy-to-understand supplier onboarding process creates a strong foundation for relationships that focus on mutual success.

Alongside relationship benefits with suppliers, your organization will also see these additional benefits when best practice supplier onboarding is instituted:

Effective and efficient supplier/buyer relationships and supplier management.
Streamlined processes and greater efficiency.
Enhanced risk mitigation (supported by data management and transparency).
A healthy and positive industry reputation as a buyer.
A sleek, well-tuned supply chain.
Reduced human error, invoice fraud, and maverick spend.
Enhanced industry, legal, and governmental compliance.
A healthier bottom line supported by optimal return on investment (ROI).
Reduced time for new supplier approval.

Supplier Risk Management Solutions from SupplierGATEWAY

At SupplierGATEWAY, we take your company’s risk mitigation seriously. As a SOC II Type 2 and ISO-certified company, we truly care about your supplier data security and accuracy.

We’ve launched over 2,500 self-service supplier onboarding portals and work with some of the world’s top brands and companies like Nike, The NBA, Vizient and LVMH.

Efficient and accurate supplier onboarding is just the beginning of effective supplier risk management—discover how our Supplier Risk Management software saves you time and money while creating more transparent supply chains and helping your organization mitigate risk.