How do you clean your supply chain and why is it important (especially now)?

In our sixth webinar of our Digital Connect webinar series, “Cleaning up your supply chain”, Sami Peltonen of Basware and Lauri Mahonen of Bisnode illuminate the importance of having your supplier data consolidated in single location. Read more to learn about the importance of data quality, the key benefits of effective supplier management, and how to recognize critical suppliers and determine their financial position.

Supplier risk management and the mitigation of supply chain risk has become more and more important, especially given the current economic climate. According to Deloitte research, many companies are extremely vulnerable to supply chain risk. This puts them at increased risk for a 25% reduction in share price as a result of a supply chain disruption. And with as many as 98% of manufacturers predicted to experience a disruption in the next 24 months, getting a hold of your supply chain becomes a crucial part of ensuring future business success. 

How Basware helps customers with supplier management challenges

There are 4 key challenges businesses face when it comes to supplier management

1. Keeping up with changing supplier information

2. Managing supplier risk and compliance

3. Lack of visibility across supplier information

4. Lack of visibility into sustainability performance of suppliers

Basware aims to take care of customers’ financial supply chain—therefore making it easier for them to focus on what’s most important during times of business instability: employee welfare, the physical supply chain, and business continuity efforts.

By automating finance and procurement processes, Basware helps companies achieve paperless operations and achieve 100% e-invoicing. What this provides them, in return, is a concept we have coined as “visible commerce.” Visible Commerce is the complete visibility across all flows of money goods, and services around the world. It’s a state where transparency and data lead to more effective and ethical decision making leading a better world economy for all.

To achieve visible commerce, businesses need to adopt 4 key aspects:

• 100% user adoption,

• 100% supplier connectivity,

• 100% invoice capture, and

• touchless processing.

Utilizing Basware as the hub of your purchase-to-pay (P2P) ecosystem, customers can leverage all the innovation and specialized solutions within the automated procurement and finance market. For successful supplier management, having a strong hub and taking advantage of the diverse data registers available through different specialized P2P solutions helps to enrich and validate the supplier information that Basware already collects.

Once that data is consolidated, Basware automatically validates suppliers against Dunn & Bradstreet data, enriches it with Dunn & Bradstreet’s additional business information and verifies it against 3^rd party data on credit, compliance, and risk data, and then uses this information across your entire P2P solution.

So, how do you clean up your master data?

During times of disruption, the quality of your supplier data is of the utmost importance. Because of this, it’s important to ensure your supplier master data is always up to date. The problem is many companies’ data is fragmented and stored in different systems making it hard to consolidate, update, and locate information.

This issue is emphasized further by the fact that many organizations are operating on a global scale, spreading the information across multiple demographics, geographic locations, and departments. According to KMPG Global CEO Outlook, 84% of CEOs are concerned about the quality of the data they’re basing their decisions on. In order to properly master and utilize your data, it must be up-to-date and consolidated in one location.

When it comes to cleansing supplier data, businesses are usually looking to achieve the following benefits among others:

• Identify and improve total spend

• Identify and improve cash flow

• Improve negotiating power

• Identify and improve supplier dependency

• Identify and improve risk exposures

• Identify opportunities

• Analyze and improve credit limit settings

It all starts with supplier data collection and identification. Then, it becomes easy to better identify your suppliers, determine your supplier hierarchy, achieve greater visibility of your total spend, and identify risk data such as a supplier’s financial statements.

Using the Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S Number (data universal numbering system), businesses can predict the reliability and/or financial stability of a supplier. It’s the key to unlocking valuable insights and analytics on business entities around the world. This unique master data source currently contains more than 350 million businesses worldwide, in over 220 countries, with over 5 million updates daily to the database. And now, this information and the power to cleanse your supplier data is all offered within Basware Supplier Management.