How Supplier Quality Management Software Saves Time & Improves Efficiency
Real talk: How much time to you spend every day, week, and month maintaining, searching, and managing massive spreadsheets as you manage suppliers and vendors?
Based on our internal market research, it’s likely you’re spending 10 to 20+ hours a week manually gathering onboarding documents and certifications, reviewing new suppliers to be qualified, renewing supplier documents, and then manually updating all the information into spreadsheets one single data point at a time.
Turning to tech is the clear way forward when it’s time to start building more efficient and scalable processes. The right quality management software can help you start automating activities, more easily identify gaps, and drive improvement within your supplier quality management initiatives.
How Spreadsheets Hurt Supplier Quality Management
Let’s be honest, at best you have a love-hate relationship with your spreadsheets. You need them as part of your supplier quality management process, but the manual nature of spreadsheets is also a time suck that slows productivity and leaves you open to internal and external risks in several ways.
Time Consuming
Collecting data from and about your suppliers can be a challenge when you’re using spreadsheets. Your team is manually entering information into the spreadsheet, a process that’s both time-consuming and prone to human error. In essence, your team is spending so much time (and therefore money) doing admin tasks instead of spending time on activities such as strategic supplier development to help you build a more efficient and cost-effective supply base.
Open to Risk
The more manual a process is, the more it’s open to accidental human errors and even bad actors. From inputting the wrong information entirely to inputting data in the wrong field, it’s easy for things to go wrong. And the more massive and complex the spreadsheets, the more difficult it is to create an accurate and up-to-date single source of truth.
Not Scalable
During times of business growth, new research and development, or other supplier-reliant activities, manual processes are often too slow and burdensome for effective scalability. To put it lightly, it’s difficult to scale your supplier quality management programs while you’re trying to stay on top of your usual supplier onboarding and renewal tasks. With manual processes, the usual path to scalability is hiring more people, which often means a costly scaling of your workforce for only a small bump in your actual supplier relationship management process.
Low Visibility
At the end of the day, spreadsheets let you view the data piece by piece, but they don’t really help you aggregate, analyze, or find insights around your data. You have to parse through everything manually to find the info you need to manage suppliers and vendors. And by the time you put it all together, that aggregated info may not be up-to-date or even relevant. Ultimately, it’s challenging to spot issues and proactively drive improvement with low visibility.
How QMS Helps Supplier Quality Management
You can start addressing all four of these issues and more with quality management software (QMS) from RizePoint. In fact, with our flexible, scalable software, you can start automating and streamlining processes, cutting the time you manage suppliers by up to 50 percent. Our supplier quality management solution can help you start proactively driving improvement instead of fighting daily to only meet the status quo.
Save Time
When you get out of spreadsheets, you gain time to be more proactive and strategic. It all starts with automating process and with an easy user experience for you and your suppliers. Initial onboarding becomes a matter of a few clicks to send clear task lists to suppliers that helps them give you the right answers and documentation the first time, saying goodbye to long email chains and hand holding.
Proactively Manage Risk
What if I told you that you’d never have to search in document repositories like Dropbox for expiring documentation and certifications ever again? This time-consuming activity is made easier through RizePoint. With in-software notifications and search functionality, renewing suppliers becomes a matter of a simple communication with a supplier for new certifications instead of a document scavenger hunt. Ensuring your suppliers are always up to date and compliant protects your customers, and it protects your business from FDA scrutiny and legal risks.
Easy Scalability
Hiring more people is costly and it doesn’t necessarily fix scalability problems if your issues stem from manual processes and massive, complex spreadsheets. With RizePoint, information provided by suppliers via the software automatically populates in an easy-to-navigate foldering structure, so you can easily review certifications, documentation, and status of each facility and supplier. Your time spent with onboarding and renewing each supplier will drop significantly so you aren’t overwhelmed during times of business growth.
High Visibility
It’s ten o’clock, do you know the status of all your suppliers and their facilities? RizePoint can help you with that too. You’ll easily see the status of any supplier or facility within a few clicks so you can “manage by exception,” AKA giving the most attention to programs and suppliers that need it most. With more visibility, you’re less open to risk and can fix issues before they become liabilities.
RizePoint offers a QMS that empowers people just like you collect, organize, and manage data around quality assurance, corporate social responsibility, and supplier quality management. Click —> here to request a free demo today.
