New Products in Tokyo, New Community Name!
You may have noticed the Procurement Service Management community just became the Procurement Operations Management Community. Why? Because great things are coming over the next several releases and we want to keep you informed on all relevant innovations for the VP of Procurement! With our latest Tokyo release we are introducing our second product in this area, Supplier Lifecycle Management, in addition to Procurement Service Management introduced with our previous release. Why Procurement Operations Management? Because we are transforming the entire engagement experience of the source-to-pay process, and one of the biggest benefits is the impact to the day-to-day operations of procurement!
New in Tokyo: Supplier Lifecycle Management
We are excited to unveil Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) within the Procurement Operations Management solution. Supplier Lifecycle Management extends the process flow from Procurement Service Management (PSM) plus adds new capabilities in the source-to-pay process. With Supplier Lifecycle Management in Tokyo, organizations can now interact, collaborate, and manage their supplier activities in one workspace.
Supplier Management Workspace
In Supplier Lifecycle Management, organizations can now interact, collaborate, and manage their supplier activities in one workspace. This includes links to key supplier information, open tasks and cases, SLA breaches, and create new cases with suppliers. This gives procurement and supplier professionals a single view of all their activities with suppliers in one place. Interactions will no longer be spread across phone calls, sticky notes, and emails in ad hoc processes.
Supplier Onboarding
You can now use Supplier Lifecycle Management to automate and accelerate the complex process of onboarding new suppliers. This means all the teams responsible for onboarding suppliers can work together in an automated and flexible workflow. Legal can collaborate on NDA and contractual needs, finance can work on reviews and oversights, GRC can tackle compliance reviews, and procurement can handle contract processing. For customers already using Vendor Risk Management, SLM will automatically extend the playbook to include vendor risk assessments embedded in the process.
Supplier Collaboration
Supplier and buyer collaboration can be one of the most frustrating and time-consuming processes in procurement. Supplier Lifecycle Management enhances supplier collaboration with buyers by providing an intuitive supplier portal. As part of the workflow and automation enablement with Supplier Lifecycle Management, the system will automatically walk supplier contacts through how to self-register, login, and collaborate with their buyers in a Supplier Collaboration Portal. This gives them a modern portal experience, a central place to view and manage all collaborations, and the ability to drive teamwork across multiple buyers.
Additionally, buyers can leverage suppliers for help. Suppliers can now view, monitor, and update their own master information and contacts within their system. This alleviates one of the worst issues faced in supplier processes: poor or stale information or misinformation.
Supplier Intelligence
Information is power, and, in the supplier management world, data driven decision making is key to making the best possible choices when large dollar values at stake. Supplier Lifecycle Management consolidates data, users, workflows, and outcomes to create a unified view of internal and external supplier intelligence, so decisions are made in no time. Supplier and procurement managers will be able to view everything that is known about a supplier in one place. This includes information that spans multiple enterprise resource planning, or ERP, systems and instances, internal master data systems, and external third-party data sets.
In addition, organizations that work with suppliers often search for information from various sources to find data on desired suppliers. With Supplier Lifecycle Management, ServiceNow can integrate and include information pulled in from different third-party sources. These third parties offer a range of information about the suppliers, including their locations and operations, regulatory and compliance information, financial information, news, and more.
Updates in Tokyo: Procurement Service Management
The San Diego release of Procurement Service Management revealed how employees could now easily self-serve their needs to procure goods and services, initiate the purchase process, and work collaboratively and prescriptively with procurement to acquire needed goods and services. This included creating sourcing requests, purchase orders, and goods receipts. Tokyo builds on these features and adds:
Goods Returns
A new playbook and workflow will walk users through the process of returning goods, including any steps needed with the procurement org for review, and steps needed with suppliers to complete returns. These playbooks are completely configurable to add automated or manual steps based on your specific business needs!
SLA Dashboards
Service Level Agreements for organizations is critical for both improving processes as well as proving performance. Tokyo adds the ability for you to review SLA performance with visualizations for cycle times for Purchase Requisitions, Sourcing Requests, Negotiations and Cases, SLA breach times vs. allotted times, and the overall procurement team's SLA performance.
More to Come
As you can see, it’s been a great year for Procurement Operations Management. And we have many more things for you coming in the next few months. Stay tuned to this community for more updates!
