Johns Hopkins University: Immediate Time Savings and Enhanced Information Security

If you’re looking for a way to automate your supplier onboarding process, you may want to look at our case study with Johns Hopkins (JH) below.

JH knew its vendor onboarding processes – which covered numerous colleges and hospitals – were highly manual and often redundant. Additionally, it lacked an appropriate level of information security.

While JH anticipated having to sort through several solutions before finding a viable one, the team couldn’t have imagined how many solutions lacked the necessary components, expertise and functionality to work how they were supposed to.

If this sounds familiar, read on.

Read the Case Study

Why Your Supplier Onboarding Process Needs to be Airtight

Overcoming Challenges in the Supplier Onboarding Process

Best Practices for the Supplier Onboarding Process

Why Choose PaymentWorks to Streamline the Supplier Onboarding Process

Get Ready for Vendor Management Appreciation Day 2024

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Read the Case Study

Learn how Johns Hopkins (JH) automated vendor onboarding and management processes. When choosing a digital supplier onboarding platform, they considered the following:

Information Security
Vendor automation best practices
Ease of use

They found exactly what they needed with PaymentWorks. Our case study delves into JH’s process and the tangible results they’ve seen since implementation.

Click here or the image below to read it.

Why Your Supplier Onboarding Process Needs to be Airtight

Vendor onboarding is the root of all things vendor management. Any mistakes that occur at this stage can have negative impacts throughout the entirety of the vendor relationship.

Unfortunately, many organizations are rife with inefficient processes that sink return on investment (ROI) while increasing cost and risk.

Without an airtight supplier onboarding process, there’s too much room for things to fall through the cracks. This opens the door to communication snafus and fraud.

Consider all the things that can go wrong:

Problem: No documentation for the supplier onboarding process or change management.

Risk: Poor communication between you and your vendors, missing documents, confusing and time-consuming manual tasks with no defined owners, increased opportunities for human error and fraud.

Problem: A culture where exceptions to the rule (aka the documented supplier onboarding process) are made frequently and/or expected.

Risk: More time wasted on workarounds to the proven process, through-the-roof vendor impersonation fraud risk

Problem: Lack of workflows, visibility and audit trails for the supplier onboarding process

Risk: Bad (or no) workflows reliant on spreadsheets and emails mean a tricky system for approvals and tracking. Lack of business controls and no ability to configure workflows and permissions means lackluster security for sensitive information. Processes that happen outside of the ERP make tracking and status updates impossible.

Problem: Lack of compliance and security checks and vendor verification that relies on third-party tools.

Risk: Manual vendor data verification drains time and resources. The vendor desk has to manually check sanctions lists multiple times (redundancies). Manual bank info verification leaves a lot to chance with the potential for massive fraud.

Whether you’re relying on documented processes, automation or a hybrid approach, airtight supplier onboarding helps you:

Reduce/mitigate/eliminate risk

If you have your compliance ducks in a row, you can mitigate risk substantially. Better yet, automation can eliminate risks associated with banking verification and payment fraud.

Improve efficiency

If your supplier onboarding process is based on best practices, you can cut time spent on unnecessary tasks and redirect energy to value-added initiatives. Moreover, you can decrease internal costs, better track spend, and ensure that procurement operations are aligned with overall business goals.

Boost the bottom line

A well-oiled supplier onboarding process allows you to execute your payables strategy easily while refining it over time. Additionally, automation can turbocharge efficiencies, reduce risks, and have significant financial impacts.

Overcoming Challenges in Supplier Onboarding and Management

Let’s use Johns Hopkins as an example of issues many organizations face when optimizing the supplier onboarding process.

Firstly, many struggle with manually intensive processes that have multiple points of entry, require duplicative data entry, and lack transparency to the end user.

Secondly, when they seek out a solution, the supplier onboarding piece is often viewed as an afterthought. Bolt-on supplier onboarding tools that accompany ERPs often try to retrofit (poorly) functionality to problems organizations face rather than offering proactive expertise and tailored tools that fit the bill.

Moreover, these tools often try to address vendor onboarding challenges with broad strokes, even though what works in one industry may not be applicable in another. In the words of the university, “It was too much like, ‘Sure, we’ll build whatever you ask for,’ rather than offer expertise. Very few of them were looking at delivering a best practice within our space.”

What JH did instead was look for the opportunity to address those issues with automation while subsequently tightening up information security. Automation allowed the university to eliminate email, print-out forms, the practice of transferring vendor information between employees, and the disposal of documents generated through the process.

Ultimately, automating by leveraging PaymentWorks allowed JH to do more with less – a greater ability to appropriately handle vendor information with less effort needed.

Best Practices for the Supplier Onboarding Process

Whether you’re creating a supplier onboarding process from scratch or fine-tuning the one you have, it’s helpful to keep the following in mind:

Prioritize vendor verification

Make sure the buyer or vendor analyst confirms the veracity of any new vendor request with the internal business owner. The buyer should also take ownership of collecting vendor information, whether by sending a link to a PDF or other in-house form where vendors can submit information. Additionally, buyers should work with accounts payable, procurement, or the vendor desk to verify vendor data.

Related sidebar: Jenn Glassman does a great job explaining why it makes the most sense to have the vendor enter its own information:

Document the supplier onboarding process

Even organizations that rely heavily on manual tasks can simplify things if they know what they need to do/collect/look out for beforehand. Document your supplier onboarding process (grab a template here) so you know what info to collect, which tools to use, which approvals to get, and the appropriate workflows. As a result, you’ll save time and headaches and keep fraud at bay.

Keep compliance current

This is huge and one you can’t afford to get wrong. You need to make sure you’re not doing business with people on sanctions lists or with debarred organizations. Every vendor should be checked (and rechecked!) against restricted lists to mitigate regulatory risk. If you have a compliance manager, this is in their court; however, the best play is creating a compliance plan (like this one!) so everyone knows their roles and responsibilities.

Establish permissions/roles/responsibilities

Make sure you know who is responsible for what, who has access to what and who has the ability to input or make changes to vendor data in the ERP. This is a lot easier with a configurable, automated supplier onboarding platform, but it can still be documented even if you’re using manual workflows.

Nurture a culture of strategy

This is perhaps the most important best practice of all. I can’t tell you how many times we hear of organizations who have culture issues that open the door to fraud. How? It comes down to how willing an organization is to break process. The more it happens, the greater the chances that money will be lost to bad actors who capitalize on this type of culture. If this sounds like your organization, a good place to start is by documenting the exceptions you’re asked to make in the supplier onboarding process. It’s a great conversation starter about why strategic vendor management depends on a solid (and followed) process.

A good supplier onboarding process isn’t just about checking boxes. It’s about removing risk, properly supporting the vendor desk, and creating efficiencies that can be leveraged to be more strategic.

Why Choose PaymentWorks to Streamline Supplier Onboarding and Management

Automating the supplier onboarding process with PaymentWorks allows you to streamline and simplify the entire vendor lifecycle management process. Every organization can benefit from a vendor onboarding process that is organized, secure and efficient, ensuring peace of mind for your entire organization.

PaymentWorks is the foundation of vendor master data and helps organizations of all kinds automate vendor onboarding. PaymentWorks provides customers with secure, compliant, and optimized business payments.

Featuring the industry’s only payments security warranty for fraudulent payments and a network of tier one partners, PaymentWorks enables customers in healthcare, higher education, K-12, state and local government, enterprise and more to capitalize on the opportunity to digitize the payments process while reducing risk, controlling costs and earning revenue.

To learn more about how we do it and the partners we work with, visit our website, check out our news, or listen to our podcast, “Risky Business”.

Get Ready for Vendor Management Appreciation Day 2024

Yes, we just celebrated the inaugural Vendor Management Appreciation Day on December 12th. BUT, the party’s not over yet! We’re celebrating Vendor Management Appreciation Day all year long.

Better yet, we get 366 days (leap year!) in 2024 to celebrate one of the most important, under-recognized roles across industries: vendor management.

Join us in observing Vendor Management Appreciation Day (VMAD)! We’re gearing up for the 2024 celebration, and we want you to be a part of it!

VMAD is a unique holiday geared toward unifying vendor management professionals and celebrating innovation in the field.

We’ve been releasing gifts each month to help you supercharge your vendor management efforts. We’re also planning some awesome events so everyone can connect and celebrate the important, strategic role of vendor management.

Learn more here, and grab some free vendor management goodies.