Vendor Onboarding

The trouble with new vendor onboarding today

Signing up and onboarding new vendors and suppliers is one of the bigger challenges procurement teams face. Each team for whom new vendors might be of use has different needs and processes, making it difficult to implement and standardize an onboarding process all teams will adopt. As a result, requests to create W-9s, or to provide this vendor access to this system, come at procurement teams from every imaginable angle: Email, Slack, the phone—you name it.

Historically, procurement has been left to make sense of this mess manually:

• Creating all requested onboarding documents (like W-9s) on their own
• Reaching out to both vendors and internal teams to collect, follow up on, and keep track of all the varying forms and documents that are created by the vendor onboarding process on their own
• Keeping relevant systems wherein this information is stored (like Netsuite or Salesforce) up-to-date on their own.

The trouble with this is manifold. It eats up procurement's time, of course—but low process adoption also creates risk and compromises compliance efforts.

With the right process experience platform, it's possible to create vendor onboarding processes that solve all of these pain points. Here's how.

1) Automatically triage requests to onboard new vendors and suppliers across teams and systems

• With Tonkean, a process experience platform that integrates with every application and data system your organization might use—including tools like Smartsheet, where new vendor/supplier information is stored—procurement teams can create automated workflows that allow end-users to submit onboarding and new vendor requests from whatever their preferred application environment.
• No matter the interface, Tonkean will prompt them to provide all the information procurement needs.
• But here's the important thing: Tonkean will funnel those requests into one centralized location that's easy for the procurement team to manage.
• Tonkean can do this because it automatically monitor all those various intake channels end-users might utilize to send in requests.

The benefits here are cross-functional: such a process ensures end-users will adopt and abide by it, because they don't have to change anything about their behavior. And it relieves procurement from having to monitor and check on those intake channels manually.

2) Generate (and follow up on) onboarding documents automatically

Whenever a new vendor is added to your internal systems, Tonkean can automatically be rendered to do different things.

• Beyond surfacing that information in one easy-to-manage place for procurement, Tonkean will also automatically generate a Google Drive folder with all the relevant onboarding templates.
• From there, it will automatically create and send important onboarding forms—like W-9s—to the relevant stakeholders via whatever system your organization uses, like DocuSign, for example.
• Finally, Tonkean will know to continue following up with the recipient—on its own—until the form in question has been signed.

All the while, procurement teams will be able to track the status of the various onboarding action items in their Tonkean portal.

3) Automatically update systems

Once new vendor onboarding forms have been generated and signed, and your vendors are set up internally, Tonkean will automatically pass their information along into whatever system you use to track vendors and suppliers, such as Netsuite or Salesforce.

All this intelligent automation saves procurement an immense amount of time, ensuring your organization never falls behind on your SLAs.

Furthermore, it ensures your organization always remains compliant, because it drastically reduces the potential for human error.