When implementing a new vendor management solution, it can be difficult to ensure your vendors are engaged. Creating an effective vendor onboarding game plan will help you to roll out to new vendors efficiently and achieve your goals.

 

What to expect

It's crucial to establish solid expectations and plan for success when moving to a new system. This often requires dedicated staff resources to provide hands-on management, helping vendors and colleagues through points of friction throughout the process. Planning and establishing internal processes early on will reduce the implementation time and in turn the time it takes to onboard each vendor.

 

Getting started

Before inviting vendors, it's important to establish the expectations you have of them to onboard. A primer email campaign needs to clearly outline the reasons why the vendor is required to complete their registration and what they may potentially miss out on if they do not. Staff receiving training and assistance during the initial learning period shows substantial benefit to staff adoption. 

 

Staff Training

Adopting a new platform can be a daunting experience for new and existing staff. Ensuring your staff has the required knowledge to navigate and use the platform is crucial to early adoption. We have many resources that can be accessed to enhance the knowledge of Felix within your team. If you require any extra dedicated training do not hesitate to reach out to your Customer Success Manager for further information.  

 

Primer Email

A primer email campaign directly from the organisation can reduce friction and encourage vendors to onboard. This is most frequently a friendly personalised message outlining why the organisation is using Felix and how it benefits the vendor. We have created a template to help outline the benefits of Felix to the vendor and provide a suggested structure. We suggest including the following:

• Tailored messaging for your organisation
• Explanation of the motivation to use Felix for vendor management
• Benefits of the vendor onboarding for your organisation using Felix
• A date that you would like the vendor to complete the registration by

 

Inviting vendors

Inviting vendors to the Felix platform is a simple process, however, monitoring the statuses of these invites is important to maximise your onboarding success. The steps below outline our best practises and will help you receive the best results. 

 

Monitoring Invites

The Vendor screen is your source of truth for managing your vendors. From this screen, you can filter by multiple useful statuses such as: 

• Panel Status (Approved, Declined, Suspended) 
• Vendor Tags
• Categories
• Country
• Progress

 

Contact Verification

When inviting a large number of existing vendors to the Felix platform, it is crucial to ensure the contact details you're using are correct. We suggest inviting companies you've recently engaged with or been in touch with. Validating the list of emails you're using will assist in minimizing the number of incorrect invites that are sent.  A common challenge that all organisations face is where invitations are not actioned because they are sent to a non-ideal person, i.e. an employee of the vendor whose role doesn’t concern project work, such as finance, etc. It is very important to identify the correct contact within the business and try to avoid generic emails such as:

• info@xxxx.com.au
• admin@xxxx.com
• remittances@xxxx.com.au
• accounts@xxxx.com.au

 

Across the finish line

We have seen past success by providing vendors with more incentives to apply. For example, letting vendors know about upcoming projects that will require Felix's approval to apply. Take the "Big Stick" approach, by mandating that POs cannot be raised, contracts signed and/or invoices paid for unregistered vendors. This approach requires planning and caution and is only recommended where extensive engagement is also offered.

 

Reviewing vendor submissions

Vendor submissions are best managed from the vendor screen once a vendor has submitted the application it will lock their account and notify the approvers within the approval workflow if they have been established as default. If you wish to establish default sign-off assignees please see our article on setting up sign-off templates.

 

Approving new vendors

Once the vendor has submitted their application you will receive an email notifying you. You can choose to approve or decline the vendor.

If you would like to customise your email notifications you can do this by navigating to Settings > Vendor Settings.

 

Measuring success

What makes a successful onboarding

Successful onboarding is best measured by the percentage of vendors on-boarded after the initial invite process. It depends on the number of vendors you are inviting and if you have followed the above steps.  It is best to discuss your goals with your Customer Success Manager as they will assist you during this process.