A supplier portal: purchasing without retyping
Order confirmations and delivery dates arrive by email and someone retypes them. When a supplier portal fixes that, and why it sometimes does not.
With a client portal, your customer looks over your shoulder. A supplier portal turns that around: your supplier logs in with you to see what you ordered, confirm when they will deliver and upload the documents you need. The goal is the same. Less email, less retyping, and one place that shows where things actually stand.
The problem it solves
At most companies I talk to, purchasing runs like this: the order goes out as a PDF by email, the confirmation comes back by email, a changed delivery date turns up in a reply to a reply, and the certificate is an attachment in the inbox of someone who is on holiday. Someone in purchasing keeps track of it in the ERP or a spreadsheet, by hand.
That works until a delivery date shifts and nobody picks it up. Then the schedule is built on a date that is already wrong, and you only find out when the material is not there.
What a supplier does in the portal
- See open orders: what was ordered, how much and for when.
- Confirm an order or propose a different delivery date, line by line if needed.
- Upload packing slips, certificates, inspection reports and declarations of conformity against the order they belong to.
- See which documents are expiring or still missing, so you do not have to chase them.
- Keep their own company details and contacts up to date.
Every confirmation and every changed date goes back to your ERP through an integration. That is the whole point of the exercise: the supplier enters it once and it is immediately right in your planning.
Why suppliers sometimes do not use it
I have to be honest about this. A customer logs in because it helps them. A supplier logs in because you ask them to, and they may have dozens of customers who all have their own portal. If you are a small customer to them, chances are they keep emailing.
- Make it as light as possible. A link in the order email that goes straight to that one order, without having to come up with a password first.
- Ask only for what you really need. Every extra field is a reason not to bother.
- Start with the suppliers you do the most business with, not with all of them at once.
- Keep a fallback. A supplier who keeps emailing should not bring things to a halt; someone in purchasing then enters it in the portal for them.
A supplier portal works when it costs your supplier less effort than replying to an email. Otherwise it stays empty.
Documents and certificates
For many companies this is the strongest argument. If you work in a sector where you have to prove which certificate belonged to which delivery, you do not want to dig that out of inboxes when an audit comes. A portal that attaches every document to an order and a supplier, with an expiry date and an alert when something is missing, turns that into a search instead of an afternoon of digging.
Start small
The first version only has to do one thing well: let suppliers confirm orders and put that confirmation in your ERP. Once that is running, documents follow. The same calculation as for a client portal applies here, see when a client portal pays for itself, except that you count the hours in purchasing instead of on the sales desk.
Technically, a supplier portal is a B2B portal with different roles. How I build one is on client portal development, and what drives the price is on the cost of a client portal.