What is Supplier Onboarding?
Supplier Onboarding is the process of collecting information about, screening and integrate prospective suppliers into your organisations supply chain.
Robust supplier management, and thus your supplier onboarding process is key to achieving ISO 9001 compliance see ISO 9001 2015 Clause 8.4 Control of externally provided processes, products, and services.
When onboarding a new supplier you should record evidence of your requirements, their agreement of commitment to said requirements and a contract of agreement to establish accountability.
What is a Supplier Onboarding Process Template and Why is it Important?
A supplier onboarding process template comprises the necessary steps that will allow you to effectively assess and integrate prospective supplier into your organisation.
A streamlined supplier onboarding process will help you vet potential suppliers quickly but also thoroughly against your standards and regulations.
A successful supplier onboarding processes will help create a strong relationship with your suppliers from the outset helping to drive productivity for both parties.
How to Create your own Supplier Onboarding Process Template
The first step in planning your workflow is to determine which objectives you want to achieve with this process.
For a supplier onboarding process, the goal is to efficiently assess and onboard new suppliers into your organisation.
Now you will want to consider the starting and endpoints of your template.
In our example which you can download below, our template begins with defining the requirements for potential suppliers and ends with the activation of the new supplier.
Once the starting and endpoints have been established you can now consider the rest of the steps that will be required to push the process through from start to finish.
Think about the steps needed to efficiently assess and integrate a new supplier into your organisation.
Don’t forget to identify any steps that require conditional logic and will affect the progression of your process.
Now you can determine who will be involved in your process. Think about the employees involved, their duties, and the specific information they will need to effectively complete the task.
Always remember, a single individual may have a role on many different steps. Alternatively, lots of roles may have responsibility on one step.
When creating roles think about the different departments in your organisation that would be involved in the supplier onboarding process template.
Once a clear plan has been established you can now design your process template.
Designing a Supplier Onboarding Process Template with Jomo247
You could use traditional methods to map out your process. However, we recommend creating digital process templates with software like Jomo247 that can automate your processes.
With Jomo247 customisable roles are incorporated in our workflow template designer, this means it is even easier to control who is involved at every step of your process.
Once your supplier onboarding process template has been completed it is now time to implement it.
It is crucial that you closely monitor the performance of your new process in real time in case it requires adjustments.
Continual improvement of your supplier onboarding processes are essential to ensuring compliance and guaranteeing the optimum operation of your organisation.
