Who is Impacted?
Arthur, a specialist on the procurement team, is responsible for onboarding new suppliers.
Jennifer is an MDM Specialist who maintains all supplier data for CleanGoods and often supports the procurement team to onboard new suppliers.
Raymond is a contact person for a prospective supplier. Raymond liaises with CleanGoods procurement team to fulfill CleanGoods’ new supplier requirements.
Kathy works on the Finance team and corresponds with Procurement in ensuring new Suppliers meet all of CleanGoods’ financial requirements.
George, a Logistics Specialist, is responsible for enriching and validating logistical information for suppliers to ensure shipments are moved properly and efficiently through CleanGoods’ supply chain.
What is the Business Problem?
As business for CleanGoods continue to expand, demand for more raw materials and finished goods dictates the business’ need to grow their supplier base. To facilitate this effort, Suppliers are subjected to a multi-MDM onboarding process which requires the collaboration of many different business teams. Since there is no such collaborative framework within CleanGoods’ current ERP platform, the supplier onboarding effort is a challenging and inefficient process that is costly and prone to error.
Current State
Arthur, a specialist on the procurement team, is responsible for onboarding new suppliers. As the business initiator of the onboarding of a new supplier, Arthur provides the basic details required to create a new supplier record.
If a supplier is sourced, this information is sent to Jennifer, an MDM Specialist, who works with Arthur and Raymond, the contact person for the new supplier, to carry out further enrichment activities on the new supplier record. Once enrichment is complete, Jennifer informs Kathy on the Finance team.
Kathy conducts their review, additional financial validations, and updates ERP with this new information before assigning the record to George.
George, a logistics specialist, reviews and validates the new supplier information and ensures transportation compliance. George then submits the task back to Jennifer.
At this point, Jennifer runs final validations and provides a final approval. This final approval is the last milestone in onboarding a new supplier and allows for procurement to generate new purchase orders.
Since the ERP application does not provide a collaborative interface, this process is mostly managed over email and attachments, which is extremely inefficient and is prone to error since all business validation checks are manual.
Future State
A Supplier MDM solution will help facilitate this process by providing a centralized hub from which supplier onboarding activities may be conducted in a collaborative fashion.
Arthur logs onto the MDM Web UI to initiate a new supplier record with minimal basic information. MDM will conduct an initial check to make sure the supplier does not already exist.
Arthur then assigns this task to Jennifer who then corresponds with Raymond, the contact person for the new supplier, to provide all further enrichment details, including relevant Ship-To/Bill-To location information. Upon completion, Jennifer then assigns the task to Kathy, a controller on the finance team. During this transition MDM runs a series of business validations to enforce mandatory fields and any compliance rules. If any fields are incomplete or fails validations, the task remains with Jennifer to rectify.
If no errors are presented, Kathy reviews this new supplier and provides additional necessary financial details. Kathy submits the task to George who evaluates all transportation information. Upon completion, George returns the task back to Jennifer who then reviews for a final approval of the new supplier. Upon this approval, MDM re-executes all business validations. Any failed validations prevent a system approval of the new supplier and Jennifer are notified to rectify the error(s). If all validations execute successfully, MDM approves the supplier and automates the publishing of the new supplier to the ERP application.
