Supplier collaboration portal enabling 500+ vendors to manage POs, submit invoices, view compliance scorecards, and collaborate on forecasting and replenishment — delivering $1.2M in invoice processing savings and reducing onboarding from 6 months to 4 weeks.
Hartwell Retail Chain's procurement team managed 500+ vendor relationships through a combination of email, EDI setup projects, and manual SAP entry. New vendor onboarding averaged 6 months of back-and-forth for EDI setup, compliance documentation, and system configuration. A 12-person accounts payable team manually keyed invoice data from PDF email attachments into SAP — a process that consumed $1.2M annually in labour costs and generated an 8% invoice error rate.
We built VendorSync in 20 weeks: a self-service vendor onboarding portal, EDI X12 850/856/810 transaction automation, real-time compliance scorecards, 13-week rolling demand signal sharing, digital PO acknowledgment workflows, and an ESG data collection module — delivering $1.2M in invoice processing savings and a board-level ESG reporting capability.
New vendor onboarding required manual EDI trading partner setup (4–6 weeks per vendor), compliance document collection and review, SAP vendor master creation, and contractual negotiation — averaging 6 months from selection to first PO.
500+ vendors submitted invoices as PDF email attachments. A 12-person AP team manually keyed invoice data — vendor, PO number, line items, amounts — into SAP. Error rate was 8%, generating significant reconciliation rework. Labour cost: $1.2M annually.
Vendor performance scorecards — OTIF, quality, compliance, ESG metrics — were compiled quarterly in Excel and emailed to account managers for vendor conversations. Between quarterly updates, there was no mechanism to surface a vendor's current performance trajectory.
13-week demand signals were shared as Excel attachments emailed weekly to vendor contacts. Vendors received the data but had no mechanism to provide feedback, flag capacity constraints, or collaborate on replenishment planning.
Purchase order changes — quantity revisions, delivery date shifts, specification changes — were communicated via email with no formal acknowledgment tracking. Unacknowledged PO changes led to vendor shipments at original quantities and delivery dates — causing receiving discrepancies.
Hartwell's board had committed to supplier diversity and sustainability targets. Gathering ESG data — carbon emissions, diversity metrics, sustainability certifications — from 500+ vendors required annual email campaigns with 40% response rates and unverifiable self-reported data.
Vendors complete a digital onboarding journey: company registration, compliance document upload (insurance certificates, diversity certifications, banking details), EDI trading partner setup via guided workflow, and contract e-signature — all self-service, completed in 4 weeks without Hartwell team involvement.
Full EDI X12 transaction automation: PO 850 transmitted to vendors electronically → vendor submits ASN 856 → vendor submits invoice 810 → AP system auto-matches and posts. 95% of invoices now processed straight-through without human touch. Exception queue handles the 5% requiring review.
Live vendor scorecard dashboards visible to both the vendor and Hartwell's procurement team simultaneously — showing OTIF, quality acceptance rate, PO acknowledgment speed, invoice accuracy, and ESG metrics. Updated daily from transactional data. No more quarterly Excel snapshots.
Rolling 13-week demand forecast shared via the portal with vendor-facing input capability — vendors flag capacity constraints, propose alternative quantities, and confirm or escalate delivery commitments. Collaborative replenishment replacing one-directional data push.
All purchase orders require formal digital acknowledgment within 24 hours. PO changes trigger a versioned change record requiring re-acknowledgment. Unacknowledged changes escalate automatically to the vendor account manager. Zero unacknowledged PO changes outstanding after 48 hours in production.
Structured ESG data collection within the vendor portal — carbon emissions per category, diversity supplier certification upload, sustainability practice questionnaire. Annual self-reporting takes vendors 20 minutes. Response rate improved from 40% to 94%. Board ESG dashboard auto-generated from portal data.
200 vendors self-onboarded. Average onboarding time 4 weeks. First EDI 810 invoices processed automatically — AP manual entry workload down 45%. Vendor scorecards live and receiving 4.2/5 satisfaction rating from vendor contacts.
500+ vendors active. Invoice processing manual effort down 95%. The 12-person AP team redeployed to vendor relationship management, exception handling, and strategic sourcing. OTIF vendor compliance improved from 71% to 89%.
$1.2M annual invoice processing savings realised. ESG reporting fully automated — board sustainability report generated from portal data in 2 hours vs 3-month manual exercise. Hartwell's procurement team won the ISM Supply Chain Excellence Award citing VendorSync as the enabling platform.
"VendorSync transformed 6-month vendor onboarding into 4 weeks and eliminated the 12-person team we had processing invoices manually. Our vendors engage with us as partners now — they see their scorecards, collaborate on forecasts, and acknowledge POs digitally. The procurement team went from firefighting to strategy. The ISM award was just confirmation."
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