Vendor discovery is crucial for the growth of any organization.
In the manufacturing industry, service vendors primarily discover services through age-old techniques such as offline directories, personal networks, references, and generalized online search engines like Google. This results in manual effort, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.
Service procurement includes all kinds of engineering requirements across projects, operations, and maintenance. This includes a combination of supply, installation, maintenance, safety, etc.
The conventional process of service procurement in the manufacturing industry goes through informal stages and procedures which have many disadvantages.
Let’s begin by examining the challenges that managers engaged in service procurement face.
1. Fewer Options and Time-Consuming Process
In the traditional process, initially, a manager relies on their personal networks or networks of other managers to identify and scout vendors for collaboration when a service requirement arises.
They also search online and try to contact suppliers via listings and directories. These limited channels only help in obtaining the contact details of the vendor.
The manager still has to spend his valuable time and effort pre-screening these vendors in order to understand their capabilities. After making this effort, buyers still have a small pool of options to choose from.
The whole process of discovery itself may take weeks to months to shortlist the most suitable vendor. Time is money.
This hampers a company’s pace of operations or projects, which reflects on its financial performance.
2. Incomplete and Unorganized Vendor Data
Services procurement is always customized as per a user’s requirements, so it is not possible to buy services off the shelf from any vendor.
That is the reason traditional service procurement is not generally organized or transparent.
Purchasing or procuring services necessitates a thorough evaluation of service providers, which entails gathering and assessing a lot of qualitative data from the vendor’s technical capabilities, financial capabilities, experience, clients, etc.
It is a huge manual task to follow up and aggregate all the relevant details and documents from vendors. Eventually, managers are left with low-confidence data points and are not able to make informed and well-considered decisions.
3. No Reviews or Testimonials
While seller and vendor reviews have become necessary for B2C buyers to make an informed decision, they still have to become mainstream for B2B purchases, especially services.
Due to the absence of the right tools and feedback mechanisms, vendors usually do not maintain customer reviews or testimonials about their previous works.
A nod of approval in the form of a review/referral from another company with which the vendor does business can reveal a lot about their genuine capabilities and professionalism.
4. Measuring the right price
Most of the time, a manager who is restricted by access to a small pool of service vendors is ultimately constrained by price discovery.
The unavailability of pricing benchmarks forces the manager into blind negotiation and ultimately higher pricing.
Having more pre-qualified vendor options implies stronger competition among them to deliver better quality services at the lowest possible price.
Thus, the whole traditional process of vendor discovery and evaluation is tedious and inefficient.
Venwiz aims to close this gap by providing a full-fledged solution by digitally organizing end-to-end service engagements for each factory, from finding the best service providers to collaborating with them and carrying out the job.
Read the solutions offered by the Venwiz platform to overcome all the challenges in vendor discovery and management processes highlighted above:
1. Verified Quality and Background of Vendors
Venwiz is the ‘go-to’ platform for helping managers across manufacturing industries discover, assess and collaborate with verified and genuine vendors from across the country.
At each stage, rigorous verification and relevancy checks are performed to guarantee that the vendor information is correct.
2. Compare and Find the Right Vendor Quickly
Venwiz reduces the time and cost of vendor discovery by previewing verified and detailed vendor profiles relevant only to the business requirements in a structured way to save time and effort, especially by helping buyers reach the shortlisting stage within a few minutes (a process that would otherwise take weeks).
Venwiz provides intelligent filtering and suggested job categories, as well as a smooth interface to zero down the results and help buyers match with the right vendor.
3. Transparency: Holistic Vendor Profiling
On Venwiz, holistic vendor profiles are created, and data is organized for intelligent vendor selection. Vendors’ capabilities, experience, certificates, references, communication, and timelines are verified and recorded in their digital profiles.
The manager can access any verified digital profile and assess if the vendor can be considered for a job…within minutes
This will help a manager in the manufacturing industry, giving them the ability to quickly assess whether the vendor is the right match for the job and increasing the chances of a vendor being available for the job.
4. Reviews and Ratings
Venwiz allows reviewing and sharing feedback under all vendor profiles and viewing previous client experiences to facilitate decision-making
Reviews and testimonials against a vendor profile by their previous clients are one of the most important decision-making criteria empowering managers to make an informed choice.
5. Price Comparison
Venwiz aggregates service vendors in the manufacturing industry from across the country to provide buyers with more scope for price negotiations and give them options.
This not only enables managers to discover the right vendor, but also empowers them with the power of negotiation. Right quality at minimal cost is the ultimate goal of every manager.
Also Read: IIoT as a service: How IIoT can be used to improve asset monitoring and logistics tracking
Join Venwiz today to source and collaborate with vendors through a single digital platform in a simplified, efficient, and smart way.
Streamline vendor options with us here!
