Best Supplier Relationship Management Software

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) is a systematic way of assessing and identifying suppliers who are crucial to a business and developing strategies to maintain successful relationships with them. It refers to all the business processes and activities that deal with the entire lifecycle of a supplier for an organization and seeks to utilize supplier relationships to gain mutual benefit on the business profits.

It includes various activities such as identification, selection, and management of relevant suppliers by evaluating their performance continually to ensure they are providing maximum value for the organization’s requirements.

Thus, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) plays an important role in supply chain management because of two primary reasons – to ensure your suppliers are performing well in order for you to achieve maximum value from them and to identify areas of improvement for optimal performance while you engage with suppliers throughout the lifecycle through regular communication and feedback or supplier development programs.

There are several benefits of using a supplier relationship management solution. It essentially offers a platform to manage your suppliers more effectively by providing 360-degree information throughout the entire lifecycle from onboarding to enabling seamless collaboration to building strong relationships as well as for taking corrective actions if required. Some of the major benefits of using and SRM solution for managing suppliers are:

• Transparency: A Supplier Relationship Management Solution (SRM) consolidates all critical information and data regarding your suppliers in a single place. It will allow you to have increased visibility into the number and type of engaged suppliers, their performance, etc. to develop your supplier strategies, from a single platform.

• Efficiency: SRM systems help make your sourcing operations more efficient by minimizing the time and effort required to manage a supply chain by automating processes and helping in vendor consolidation.

• Collaboration: SRM system can help you develop a transparent relationship with your suppliers through regular communication and result in long-term strategic partnerships offering several benefits including cost benefits.

• Decision-making: SRM solutions improve forecasting and decision-making by offering a deeper knowledge of what your suppliers are capable of.

• Supplier Quality: An effective SRM solution has capabilities of detecting issues in supplier relations, generating reports on performance, etc. to identify quality suppliers and develop them or blacklist non-performing suppliers to ensure a quality supply base.

• Supplier Compliance: Using supplier management software allows you to track suppliers’ compliance and ensure they meet the compliance regulations of your organization as well as standard compliance requirements.

• Supplier Performance Evaluation and Monitoring: A Supplier Relationship Management software allows you to evaluate supplier performance easily using various tools like ratings, scorecards, etc., and evaluate and monitor KPIs like On-time Delivery, Quality of Delivery, Order Accuracy, etc.

• Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating supplier risk is another critical benefit of having efficient supplier management solution. It helps in identifying and assessing the impact of the supplier risks and devising appropriate risk mitigation measures.

Onboarding a new supplier is a simple procedure with MeRLIN’s user-friendly interface. 

You can send an invite to a supplier from MeRLIN’s buyer portal. Once the supplier receives this invite link, he can register by submitting his details via MeRLIN’s supplier portal. The registered supplier names will be displayed on your buyer portal as interested suppliers. After the interested supplier gets approved by the buyer team, the supplier gets onboarded. 

Buyers could also fill the registration form on behalf of a supplier and also edit/modify registration information submitted by a supplier. Automated workflows and ability to configure business rules for compliance verifications in MeRLIN substantially speed up the on boarding process while saving time and minimizing mistakes.

MeRLIN makes it simple to configure business rules based on country-specific requirements for onboarding your suppliers. All mandatory criteria for a supplier can be verified automatically based on their location/country. You can mandate document submissions as per item category, check certification requirements, etc using business rules.

Supplier information management (SIM) is a systematic process of collecting, authenticating, verifying, storing, updating and analyzing all data related to suppliers.

MeRLIN’s SRM solution provides a consolidated view of all supplier-related information and streamlines supplier data management. It manages supplier profile and regulates the document submission and certifications according to the item category. Suppliers/Buyers can update supplier information from the supplier or buyer portal respectively.  It also features flexible supplier dashboards that offer advanced search, filtering and reporting options for the purpose of viewing and managing supplier information.

MeRLIN’s supplier performance management solution can help you in evaluating and tracking the performance of your suppliers and their Supplies. Expeditors, at the time of marking items and services as received, can assess the shipment based on various configurable parameters. The software allows you to leverage supplier analytics to compare and assess supplier performance against organizational benchmarks, monitor and analyze KPIs, assess supplier risk exposure levels and take informed decisions, gain insights to mentor preferred suppliers or identify and act upon non-preferred suppliers, and much more.