Supplier Relationship Management

8MSaaS automates the strategic sourcing process to create greater procurement intelligence and negotiation power and avoid unnecessary human interventions which might create confidentiality issues. It automates transaction procurement activities to achieve higher levels of efficiency, compliance and cost-savings.

Besides e-Sourcing, e-Procurement and e-Tender, 8MSaaS  also supports Supplier Relationship Management and Portfolio and Project Management for the sourcing and acquisition of complex products and the management of the long-term services such as strategic outsourcing.

One of the crucial steps in supplier management is the ability to locate the best supplier quickly and have complete transaction history to support decision making. 

Supplier & Procurement Management provides comprehensive supplier information in the following ways: 

• Profile information including general information,organization information, contact information, legal information, financial information and credential information
• Products and services offerings
• Interaction records and action items, and opportunities
• Transaction information including revenue records,contract and order information.

provides 360°supplier information in real-time and will increase your ability to find and work with suppliers.

provides qualification management for new suppliers and performance management for existing suppliers. The following information for each supplier is updated and displayed when each transaction occurs:

An easy-to-use e-Survey feature is also provided to allow quick solicitation of the opinions of different people in different departments about the performance of a particular supplier and the results will be automatically aggregated.

provides the following basic and advanced product management features to manage supplier products:

• Product price control to ensure that products and services that are being purchased are within reasonable price ranges
• Comparison of prices, services and other terms and conditions of the same product offered by different suppliersto ensure the most appropriate selection
• Product and supplier approval mechanisms to ensure qualified products and services provided by qualified suppliers
• Supplier self-services facility to reduce the overhead of supplier product information and to allow it to be updated in a timely manner
• Real-time inventory update mechanisms based on transactions to reflect up-to-date product inventory
• Facility for setting and detecting minimum inventory levels and an automatic alert for replenishment

supports procurement plan, material plan and ad-hoc based e-Procurements. allows the business or procurement department to construct purchase plans and purchase orders can be generated automatically from the purchase plan or manually on the fly. also manages pick-pack-and-ship, delivery and return as well as keeps track of invoices and payments. The whole process has strong finance connectivity and purchase orders are link to the budget, invoices are linked to account payable and payments are linked to the actual expenditure of the department.

Using , different departments can formulate different plans for their different spending categories for purchases. The Purchase Plan provides the following features: 

• Identification of all items that need to be purchased and the ability to link items to a schedule for managing the timing of the purchases
• Integration with the product inventory function to effectively avoid overabundance
• Directly linkage with Purchase Orders to reduce manual input and errors
• Management of fulfillments according to the plan and tracking deviations
• Automatic alerts during the entire purchase planning and execution process

PR  and its rule-driven control process can be used as the preamble of request-for-information, request-for-proposal and request-for-quotation types of tendering. PR can be used for any department to  request items that might be partially or fully in stock.  The user is allowed to view the inventory information and generate inventory request for the needed items.

allows the establishment of the benchmark prices of products based on their historical prices and CPI adjustments. The benchmark prices are used to control the significant derivation from the price norms. In , each supplier is being measured in real-time its cumulative price derivation from the corresponding benchmark prices. Each purchase order is being measured in real-time its total derivation from the corresponding benchmark prices. And each purchase item is being measured in real-time its derivation from the corresponding benchmark price. The procurement department can be easily see which requestor or procurement person has the highest derivation for single purchase or the highest cumulative derivation year-to-date.

The most important element of pre-selection management is not what decision is made but the process employed to make it. The pre-selection process can help to validate the sourcing strategy, increase the understanding of the suppliers, and uncover pitfalls to avoid future problems. The pre-selection process involves extensive communication and documentation and the control of conflicts of interest. provides a framework for effective supplier pre-selection based on industrial best practices to help organizations to conduct pre-selection in an diligent manner.

provides an effective framework for creating plans and strategies for different types of tenders. It supports the end-to-end process of e-Tendering and tracks the following:

provides web access for tender solicitation, communication and submission for all parties.

• Each bidder can log into the system and access the identical info
• Tender information is electronically available to all bidders at the same time
• Electronic discussion forums to ensure every bidder will receive the same Q&A info at the same time
• Each bidder can submit its tender response to the system; the system will automatically cut off submissions at the deadline

supports the entire procurement process from purchase requisition to payment. Purchase orders, invoices and payment requests can be managed by each department separately and by corporate as a whole. also provides a framework for sophisticated contract management for complex acquisitions.

e-Procurement can aggregate and classify organization’s spend data for its purpose of reducing costs, improving operational performance and ensuring compliance.  For the organizations that are using multiple disparate systems for item purchases and expense reports, they can migration their data to e-Procurement and won’t need to worry about data cleansing and migration  subsequently and dashboard and report generation repeatedly.

8 Manage e-Procurement can help the user generate answers to the following questions affecting their spending, including:

• What are the organization really spending?
• With whom the organization spending it?
• Is the organization getting what’s been promised for that spend?

The spend visibility provided by e-Procurement Spend Intelligence helps the user gain insights into what their organization buys and from whom, and it helps them realize savings promised by past sourcing efforts.

In complex engagements, there will be different accountabilities associated with different people in buyer and supplier organizations. supports the management of accountabilities across groups and enterprises; and the ability to monitor and track your resources and your suppliers’ resources allocated for projects and programs. This includes the tacking of resource experience and expertise, resource commitments, allocation time vs. actual utilization time, planned resource cost vs. actual resource cost, detection overloaded and inadequate conditions and automatic calculation of resource costs in projects and programs. In all cross group project and program management, supports all 9 areas of project management practices defined by PMI.

provides the e-Banking equivalent level of security to protect e-Sourcing and e-Procurement information and transactions. Security features are highlighted as follows:

In addition, provides the Audit Trail facility to allow the user to navigate the change history and trace business data changes.