Tool
One supplier onboarding, end to end
How many suppliers are onboarded a month, how many minutes each one takes end to end, what an hour of the person handling it costs, what share ends up incomplete and what going back costs. Below, the same case with an agent: where it goes, what it does at each step and what stays with a person.
One supplier onboarding, end to end
- the agent does it
- a person does it
- always a person
the steps of the onboarding
- Receive the documents and acknowledgePortal or email
Receives them wherever the supplier sends them, email included, and confirms on the spot what arrived and what is missing.
- Check format and validityPortal or email
Checks each document is the type requested, complete, signed where it should be and not expired, and returns every finding at once.
- Cross check between documentsPortal or email
Confirms legal name, tax number and address say the same across all ten, which a person misses because they look at one at a time.
- Validate the tax number against the registerTax register
Queries the public register and confirms the declared status is the real one, before the file moves on.
- File the documentsThe file
Saves each document in the folder and under the name the company uses, so it turns up when it is needed.
- Create the master recordERP master
Writes the supplier into the system with validated data, through the same path every other onboarding uses.
- Watch the expiry datesThe file
Looks at every date every day and asks for the renewal before it expires, which is the task nobody does by hand.
- Accept an exceptionERP master
The foreign supplier without the local certificate, the company still being incorporated. The responsible department decides, on an already cleaned file.
Today that is 70 hours a month and 12 onboardings left with something wrong. Between the time and what discovering it later costs, USD 1,320 a month.
With the agent holding 7 of the 7 steps, 4 hours and USD 66 are left.
The difference is USD 1,254 a month, USD 15,048 a year.
And 36% of that difference is not time: it is the suppliers onboarded with an expired document or a detail that does not match.
Of what a person still does, the heaviest step is: Accept an exception.
You set all five numbers. How the minutes split across steps is ours, taken from how it gets done by hand. The modelling assumption: an error born of reviewing documents one at a time and late falls in the same proportion as that review stops being manual.
This object is the interactive half of an article: Onboarding a supplier: ten documents, four departments and nobody watching the clock