4 Big Compliance Challenges for Vendor Management Teams & How Syncrofy Can Solve Them

Your suppliers are key to the success of your business which makes it so important to hold them accountable. Pain points like inefficient receiving, inventory stockouts, lost sales, and sky high shipping costs can all rear their ugly heads when your suppliers fail to live up to their end of the bargain.

But why does this happen? We’ve zeroed in on four of the top compliance challenges for vendor management teams and how you can overcome them.

1. Antiquated vendor risk assessment approach

Legacy software and outdated tools aren’t helping the cause when it comes to maintaining vendor compliance. Unfortunately, many organizations “don’t know what they don’t know” and fail to realize there could be a better way. The problem with many of the standard spreadsheet programs is that most of them don’t offer proactive, real-time monitoring that can help you identify issues with your suppliers before they become larger headaches. Many of these programs also typically don’t provide a way to collaborate with suppliers so you can solve those problems together.

2. Vendor monitoring processes that don’t make the cut

An ongoing global pandemic (with no end in sight) and disruptive business landscape has limited resources and made monitoring vendors an increasingly difficult task. As a result, many organizations are becoming desperate and turning to monitoring systems that aren’t quite ready for primetime–to put it nicely. And when that happens, it has a negative trickle down effect that impacts compliance teams and makes it nearly impossible to define metrics and live up to supplier expectations.

3. An abundance of data, systems, and tools that muddle the waters

We live in a world of information overload and it sometimes does more harm than good. For both you and your suppliers, different data and information exist within various business units–increasing the chances of human error and making operational efficiency nearly impossible to achieve. To truly ensure synergy with your suppliers you need to take it a step further. Having a way to communicate with them via a centralized platform while exchanging real-time supply chain data in the process is critical to getting on the same page and implementing a compliance program that everyone can buy into.

4. Regulatory pressure on the rise

With the regulatory environment continuing to change at a rapid pace, the pressure has been heightened to ensure compliance remains consistent and aligns with those regulations even as the goal posts continue to shift. Your policies and how you deal with your suppliers (and vice versa) must be in alignment with one another or you risk major non-compliance issues, fees, penalties, fine, and liability concerns (i.e. FDA regulations).

The best, most efficient way to overcome these challenges and get on the same page with your suppliers is to implement a vendor compliance program with them.

How Syncrofy can help power your vendor compliance program

You should do everything you can to help your suppliers perform better and a big part of that is giving them the ability to view real-time, accurate demand data. Syncrofy provides a platform to ensure they send you accurate and complete ASNs by empowering them with human-readable versions of ASNs and errors—including reporting and dashboards to identify trends and potential problems. With Syncrofy you get an ASN compliance program in-a-box–with ASN error dashboards right out of the box. You’ll be empowered to receive ASNs from suppliers, validate the ASNs against EDI standards and business rules, automatically notify partners of errors for their ASNs, and calculate charges and bill your suppliers.

Syncrofy gives power right back to your suppliers by notifying them of ASN errors and allowing them to correct those errors before shipments arrive. It also delivers self-service analytics so they can report on ASN errors and resolve problems proactively at their root. Need your ASNs a certain amount of time before the shipment? Syncrofy highlights late ASNs relative to other dates associated with that specific order or shipment—and flags you if product is over or under shipped so there’s no gray area. 

Whether it comes from the PO or your WMS, Syncrofy can cross-reference it and flag the ASN as “late.” With Syncrofy, you don’t have to spend valuable time building error lists and manually charging fines to your suppliers. Syncrofy can calculate fines and fees and sends them to your billing system to allow you to charge your suppliers.

Far-reaching benefits that advance your business

Syncrofy empowers you to charge suppliers for delayed ASNs, noncompliant ones, those with invalid EDI, or lacking necessary data.

You can also boost collaboration with suppliers by using a uniform source of data to improve the quality and accuracy of the data in the suppliers’ ASNs. Syncrofy allows you to improve your receiving operations by having reliable, accurate data at your fingertips indicating what suppliers are shipping and when. It can help you:

• Improve your receiving operations by 65%
• Save you money by helping you avoid missed sales opportunities by up to 35%
• Help you forecast staffing and warehouse space requirements based on shipment arrivals
• Speed up time-to-receive per shipment by 70%
• Shorten time between shipment arrival and goods being on shelves for purchase

Learn more about Syncrofy

Designed with non-technical users in mind, Sycnrofy provides full supply chain visibility and actionable insights from day one—no need to configure, map, or develop a specialized data warehouse. It calculates fill rate and lead time for both orders and shipments and reconciles invoices against POs, shipment documentation, and receipts to identify quantity and price discrepancies. 

Click here to explore how Syncrofy can help you take back control over your supply chain today.