Many retail organizations have a handful of staff to manage thousands of partners. For example, 1:500 ratios are common, with 3-4 staff responsible for 2,000 vendors. And while it's one thing to maintain focus on the few largest vendors, it's often a struggle to keep up with onboarding and certifying the thousands of smaller vendors.
Three chronic issues result from this lack of automation.
It takes a long time (months, sometimes) to on-board a new vendor, making it a losing proposition for all. The vendor and retailer lose sales and the customer can't buy the item stuck upstream in the supply chain.
Partners are often brought online with data quality issues, since certification systems may not be the same as production systems.
Retailers (and vendors) have little visibility to ongoing vendor community performance, since exception management systems aren't linked to shared scorecards.
Inovis Community Management is an on-demand service that allows you to quickly and accurately rollout and certify vendors to compliance changes. Unlike homegrown systems, Community Management is a shared system between buyers and sellers, and combines transaction monitoring with remediation tools to fix chronic errors from the start.
Features
Partner Assessment. Surveys, email notifications and task-lists help gauge vendor readiness to program updates prior to rollout.
On-boarding Management. Simplify the vendor setup process across thousands of partners with integrated workflow tools, including invites, tasks, alerts and milestones.
Self-Certification. Vendors use a role-based online system to self-test for compliance certification against specific business rules and compliance guides, not just document syntax.
Contact Database. And since this is an on-demand service, the trading partner database can become the single source for maintaining partner contacts.
Inovis Community Management is part of the Partner Performance Management suite, combining with three other modules (Operations Support, Deductions Management and Scorecarding) to provide a complete vendor management solution.
Community Management monitors a carbon-copy of transaction data against business rules and provides a flexible workflow system to manage projects. These modules are pre-integrated with Inovisworks, and integrate with any third-party value-added network or other data source.
Here's how it works:
Project Planning: Setup onboarding workflow, including milestones and tasks.
Assessment: Web surveys collect data on partner program readiness, and feed the central partner database.
Enrollment: Manage the partner rollout groups in waves according to readiness.
Self-Certification: Partners simulate, test and debug transactions against specific compliance rules, so they can make back office changes.
Project Tracking: Monitor partner progress with dashboards and reminders.
Remediate: Create remediation programs for poor performers.
