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1. Vendor Onboarding:
   • Vendors need to be established in a retailer's purchasing application. Creating a vendor requires a lot of data, such as contact information, payment details, lead times, minimum order quantities and values.
     • The vendor information should go through an approval process, and only after the final approval should the vendor be created in the purchasing application.
     • The approval process should be dependent on the type of vendor, such as domestic, importer or overseas, or a 'test vendor.'
     • All information collected for the vendor should be validated with the rules setup in the retailer's purchasing application and may indeed drive a different workflow within the retailer's organization.
2. New Item Onboarding
   • Vendors should be able to introduce new items to the retailer through the portal. The vendor should be able to enter all the characteristics of the item such as description, weight, dimensions etc.
   • The retailer may add related information as well, defining product hierarchy, display constraints, etc.
   • New item information goes through an approval cycle before it is then transferred into the retailer's operational product database. The item information should be validated with the rules set in the retailer's product database. A full audit trail of changes made, by whom, when and for what reason, may also be built and archived in the workflow database.
3. Vendor Agreements
   • The retailer establishes terms and conditions with its suppliers. These terms and conditions are both general and financial in nature and comprise discounts, payment terms, discount days, return policies, etc.
     • The agreements can be global for a vendor across all of a merchant's sites or be made site-specific.
     • Configurable scripting of each term and condition with your vendor. Roles throughout the approval workflow can choose to exempt specific terms and conditions during the approval process. Vendor portals will maintain an audit trail of exempted terms with user details and comments.
     • Configurable approval process to finalize the vendor agreements. Ensure that departments such as merchandising, buying, legal, finance, transportation and others have a visibility and a stake in the vendor agreement approval process.
     • Agreements can be modified, leading to a newer version of the existing agreement. The new version will go through its approval process and will replace the existing version subsequent to the approval.
4. Vendor Deals and Allowances
   • Provide vendors with special allowances during new product introductions, markdowns, vendor trade shows etc. Unlike the merchandise vendor agreements, the special vendor allowances are valid only for a defined time period.
     • Configure numerous allowances such as markdowns, cost credits, display/fixture allowance, vendor trade shows and many others. A vendor portal provides dynamic forms necessary to capture all information related to each allowance type.
     • Vendor allowances are established only after undergoing a configurable approval workflow process. Subsequent to the final approval, the agreement is transmitted to the merchant's financial accounting applications.
     • Allowances can be defined for specific merchandise categories, class or subclass. These categories reside in the merchant's merchandise management application. Allowances can also be defined for specific SKU's, which can be input by the user.
     • Map each allowance created in the vendor portal to a corresponding GL account.
5. AP & Claim Details
   • Real time visibility of accurate account balances, invoice details, payment history, claims detail retrieved from the merchant's host financial accounting application. Vendor portals also retrieve supporting documents, such as invoices and PO's from the host application.
   • Extensive search capabilities to search for invoices that have been paid or are pending payment using parameters such as invoice numbers, invoice date range, supplier number, PO number, etc. Search results can be exported to PDF or MS Excel.
6. Supplier Communications
   • Vendor portals support the upload of user defined content. This function can be used by all users for information and reference. Some possible usages are for announcements, manuals and form templates.
   • Role-specific content can be defined with separate documents available for public, registered users and internal users. Create and deliver content targeted at specific vendors or to the entire vendor pool.
   • Content editor in vendor portals support functions such as composition, modification, publishing and archival. Define roles that will accomplish each function.
   • Create content categories to group and organize related content. Define the time duration in which the content will be displayed in the portal.
7. Visibility into Sale and Stock Data
   • For vendors to be able to plan their replenishments, it is essential that they have visibility into the sale and stock data from the stores. This data can be published on to the supplier portal from a data warehouse at the close of business.
   • Retailers should be able to run canned reports using advanced search filters.
8. Shared Planograms
   • Retailers want to derive feedback from suppliers on placement of newly introduced items in the store.
   • Shared planograms can be published by the merchandising application into a shared location. The portal will allow a supplier access to the published planogram. The retailer will have visibility into whether the supplier has accessed the planogram or not.

• Achieve sustainable, repeatable savings to the retailers;
  • Improved cash flows
  • Lower procurement costs
  • Big reductions in data entry labor costs
  • Monitor and manage spending throughout one's organization
• Generate value through enterprise-wide supply management;
  • Employee empowerment
  • More efficient business processes
  • Significantly less errors
  • Improved information quality
  • More accurate and up-to-date information
  • Complete audit trail of entries and changes
  • Improved accountability
• Collaborate more effectively with vendors and suppliers;
  • Highly increased visibility to both retailers & suppliers
  • Secure supplier self service model
  • Simplification and automation of the procure-to-pay cycle
• Integrate strategic practices for supplier qualification, negotiation and contract management through a single analytical framework.
  • Better negotiated vendor terms and conditions
  • Measure compliance with your organization's procurement policies
  • Identify duplicate contracts

1. Flexible workflow management:
   • The workflow engine is built as the core of the vendor portal. The functional flexibilities of the entire portal will be determined by the robustness of the workflow engine.
   • The workflow engine will allow users to setup roles and role-based permissions. Users can be created against these roles and will inherit the permissions associated with the roles.
   • The workflow configuration uses the organization setup and user definition to build sequential approval-based workflows. Each step in the workflow can be configured with an approval role defined to perform a specific activity during the workflow.
   • Workflows can be designed for various modules of the application such as vendor management, vendor agreements, content management etc.
The fields for each workflow will need to be customized for each client. The roles which will have access to the fields during each stage of the workflow also need to be customized


2. Robust audit trails
   • The application should provide robust audit trails, containing not only who changed at what time, but also field level information on the data that was changed.
   
   
   
   
3. Stability
   • The application should be flexible enough to be easily integrated with a retailer's in house ERP applications. These could be packaged ERPs, custom solutions in both legacy and new technologies.
   • Integration will primarily occur with the identity management, vendor master and financial applications.
   • The application should be able to present the rule validations occurring in the ERP application for error identification.
4. Personalization
   • The portal interface should be able to be customized based on the client's branding requirements.
5. Compatibility
   • The portal is accessed through a web browser by many users who will be outside of the periphery of the retail organization. Therefore it is necessary that the portal be compatible with all commonly used web browsers.
6. Performance
   • The concurrency of users accessing the application will increase exponentially with the increase in vendors. This is due to the fact that, each vendor will have multiple users. The application should be able to bear the stress load for multiple users performing data intensive activities.
   • Search capabilities of the application should be highly optimum and above par.
7. Security
   • Since external users have access to the portal, it is necessary to have strong access and authentication mechanisms to prevent access to applications outside the boundary of the portal.
   • Users should have visibility and access to areas in the portal as determined by their role permissions.

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