Transcript 0:00 Most procurement technology business cases have a hidden assumption built in. It's the exact same one in almost every single business case I've seen. Supplier onboarding and enablement. 0:11 Your sourcing platform doesn't save you a dollar until suppliers bid in it. Your risk tool doesn't flag anything to you until suppliers submit their information. 0:21 Your procure-to-pay system doesn't finish a transaction until suppliers send purchase order confirmations and invoices to the right place. 0:28 I don't care how good the software is, none of it works without participation from people who do not work for you. And that's the part nobody scopes. You don't control suppliers in your procure tech initiatives. 0:42 This week, why supplier onboarding and enablement quietly decides whether your procure tech project delivers on its promise, and six questions that separate the vendors who've solved for this from the ones who haven't and leave it up to you. 0:55 [ on-hold music] Welcome to Procure Tech Unpacked. I'm Joel Conneen Demers. 1:12 This is the show that helps procurement professionals understand the technology shaping our function. So let's establish the stakes properly here. 1:20 Internal change management in technology projects is already brutal, and you're playing with a stacked deck internally. 1:27 You've got an org chart, an executive sponsor, a budget, a training mandate, and in a good year, someone's performance review is tied to the adoption of a new tool. 1:37 You have every lever there is to incentivize behavior change. And collectively, we still have a very hard time implementing technology successfully. 1:46 And this happens year after year, AI, no AI, over and over again since the '90s. Now, take all of that away. Take away the org chart, the sponsor, the mandate, the review. That's supplier onboarding and enablement. 2:01 It's external change management, and the only lever you've got left with your suppliers is your spend, which for most of your supply base isn't the lever you think it is. 2:12 So when a software vendor tells you suppliers are gonna love using their portal, understand what's actually being claimed, that people that don't work for you who get nothing out of this are going to voluntarily do data entry for you. 2:26 Unfortunately, that's much easier said than done. Here's the thing about suppliers. They hate working in your systems. They always have, and they always will. 2:36 They already hate working in their own systems, just like your own employees. And it's not just you and your systems, it's every single customer they have and their systems. 2:46 So any procure tech solution built on the assumption that suppliers will happily maintain a separate profile in your environment, that solution is obsolete from the get-go. You've already figured this out internally. 2:58 It's why intake and orchestration solutions took off in the past few years. We stopped asking requesters to come to procurement and started trying to meet them where they already work, in email, in Teams, in Slack. 3:10 This is the same principle at work. We just haven't extended it past the firewall yet. Your supplier portal needs to become a supplier experience layer if you want supplier adoption of your business processes. 3:23 And the different isn't cosmetic. 3:26 So today I'm gonna lay out six things that I'm seeing on the market that actually change this dynamic, and they also double as six questions for any vendor that's pitching you on a solution that requires the supplier to participate to be successful. 3:40 The first two questions are about shrinking the ask. Number one, are you gathering information or validating it? The old supplier portal model sends suppliers a blank form and asks them to type their life story into it. 3:52 The new model builds the supplier record proactively. You pre-populate with what you already know, you augment it with third-party data, and then you ask the supplier to confirm rather than create. 4:05 The better version of this, I hope we get to one day, is to let suppliers port information from a central record that they maintain once and give access to customers on a case-by-case basis. 4:17 Now, fair, most of your suppliers don't have that record today, but that's also an opportunity. 4:23 If you're the customer who shows them how to build one on a platform you use, you're the customer who's making their life easier. They remember that, and then you've stopped fighting data decay with follow-up emails. 4:35 Number two, does it require a login? I'll say this plainly. If you're still asking suppliers to create a username and password in twenty twenty-six to do everything, your supplier experience is obsolete. Full stop. 4:47 Things like domain recognition, magic links, and background authentication can help with this. 4:53 The supplier clicks, the system knows who they are, nothing else needs to happen for them to gain access to the functionality you need them to gain access to. 5:01 No credentials management, no password reset emails rotting in the spam folder. Every login screen is a place where a supplier closes the tab and never comes back. 5:11 And then you need to manage the supplier account through multiple individuals as well. Do you hear that? That's not an, a user experience complaint. That's your business case leaking. 5:23 The next two are about not making suppliers navigate your architecture. So number three, does it connect to your whole stack? Your stack is not a monolith. Never was, never will be. 5:36 You've got an ERP, maybe you've got an intake layer now, you've got a sourcing tool, a contract life cycle management system, risk system, maybe a supplier relationship management tool. 5:46 Every one of these modules or system needs supplier data to correctly function. So your supplier experience layer can't be a dead end. It's the front door to the whole ecosystem in the back. 5:57 The supplier walks through one door, the information routes everywhere it needs to go in the back end, and if it doesn't, you haven't built a front door. 6:05 You've built another silo with another partial version of the truth. 6:09 And from the supplier side, if I have to tell them, "Update your banking information here, respond to the RFQ over there, upload your compliance documents in this third place," that's not an experience, it's a scavenger hunt. 6:22 Number four, does it handle the full range of supplier sophistication? So you need to cover both ends of the spectrum and everything in between. 6:30 On one end, you've got strategic suppliers that are already running AI agents against their sales and proposal processes, and in a few years, you may not be talking to a human at all. 6:41 When building your supplier experiences, it's important to ask whether an agent will be able to respond to your requirements in time, whether their system can push any update via API or MCP server to your systems, for example. 6:54 And then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got Marie from accounting mailing a handwritten invoice three months after somebody fixed the pipe in your third floor supply closet. 7:03 You need to ask yourself whether Marie can complete the entire interaction by email. Can she reply with a W-9 attached if she's in the States and have it land in your SRM system? 7:13 Can she confirm pricing without clicking anything and just replying to an email? That's possible today with the leading tools in this space. 7:22 And if your platform only does one end of the spectrum, you've enabled part of a supply base and told yourself the full benefits are gonna follow, which is a bit naive. 7:32 The best supplier experience layers are invisible to the suppliers who don't need the sophistication and wide open for as much sophistication as you want for the ones that do. Now, the last two are about status. 7:44 Number five, are supplier stakeholders in the workflow or are they outsiders waiting on an email? Number six, can it tell a transactional supplier from a strategic partner? The solution, that is. 7:58 Given I wanna be conscious of the time in this episode, the details for those two additional questions are in the full article related to this show, and the link to that article is in the show notes. 8:08 Essentially, you wanna be able to treat suppliers as full-fledged stakeholders of your business processes. So what do you actually do with this information? 8:17 Well, the legacy portal was designed for a world where buyers held all the power and suppliers did what they were told. 8:23 That world is gone, and if we're honest, it never really existed, we just had enough leverage not to notice. So two scenarios to consider. 8:31 One, if you've got a mature procure tech stack, stop treating the lack of supplier adoption as a change management problem because it isn't. 8:39 It's a friction problem, and every point of friction between your requirement and the supplier's inbox is a place where your business case quietly gets eroded. 8:48 As you go forward, count the logins, count the handoffs, count the times you've asked for something you already know. 8:55 Add supplier experience as a new continuous improvement guiding principle going forward as you iterate on your stack. 9:03 And number two, if you're evaluating new systems, put these six questions in the demo scripts or in your requirements. Make them show you, can a supplier complete this by email only in a two-minute demo? 9:15 And you'll learn more about how they think about supplier experience, the software vendor that is, than from any scoring matrix. 9:22 In either case, the first sign your approach needs revisiting is that suppliers will still have to log in somewhere to do business with you systematically for every single transaction. 9:33 Of course, with data privacy, data security, there may be certain types of transactions where you do need additional security, and login and password is the best way to do that. 9:43 However, for a lot of your suppliers, uh, supplier users, I should say, they don't necessarily need that level of security to transact with you. That's it for this week. 9:53 If this was useful, the most helpful thing you can do is send this episode to whoever on your team is currently chasing a supplier for a document that you've already received twice over the years. See you soon. 10:06 That's a wrap on this episode of ProcureTech Unpacked. If this one resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Procurement newsletter for weekly insights between episodes. 10:16 If something we covered sparked a question or an idea, we'd love to hear from you. All the links for the reports we discussed are in the show notes. We'll see you next time. [outro jingle] Resonate.
