Exploring Supplier Lifecycle Operations

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Supplier Lifecycle Operations

    ServiceNow® Supplier Lifecycle Operations streamlines supplier management by enabling quick onboarding, efficient data handling, performance monitoring, and enhancing team productivity in supplier engagement. This application allows suppliers to utilize self-service options for a smoother operational experience.

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    Key Features

    • Faster Supplier Onboarding: Accelerate the onboarding process with workflows to quickly integrate new suppliers.
    • Automatic Supplier Information Import: Integrates with Craft.co for seamless data import of supplier details.
    • Supplier Self-Service: Empowers suppliers to manage onboarding tasks, respond to queries, and track their purchase orders and invoices.
    • Supplier Data Management: Allows suppliers to update their own information, ensuring data accuracy.
    • Case and Contact Management: Facilitates the creation and management of supplier cases and contacts.
    • Risk Minimization: Identifies potential risks during the onboarding of new suppliers.
    • Performance Management: Establishes KPIs to assess supplier performance effectively.
    • Many-to-Many Mapping: Allows a single contact to be associated with multiple suppliers, enhancing flexibility (available from December 2024).

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing Supplier Lifecycle Operations, organizations can expect improved supplier relationships, reduced onboarding times, enhanced data accuracy, and better performance monitoring. This ultimately leads to increased productivity and reduced risks associated with supplier management.

    Use ServiceNow® Supplier Lifecycle Operations to empower suppliers with self-service to simplify operations and improve productivity.

    Overview of Supplier Lifecycle Operations

    Supplier Lifecycle Operations enables you to onboard suppliers quickly, effortlessly manage supplier data, add key supplier contacts, monitor supplier performance, and enhance the productivity of the teams that engage with suppliers.

    Benefits of Supplier Lifecycle Operations

    Supplier Lifecycle Operations provides the following benefits:

    • Faster supplier onboarding: View details about new suppliers and onboard suppliers quickly using onboarding workflows and start purchasing goods and services.
    • Automatically import supplier information: Supplier Lifecycle Operations integrates with the supplier Intelligence platform, Craft, which enables you to import and view all the important supplier details.
    • Supplier self-service: Enhance the supplier experience by enabling suppliers to complete onboarding tasks, get their questioned answered, and fulfill requests, such as viewing open purchase orders and submitting invoices.
    • Supplier data management: Provide flexibility to suppliers to manage and update their own data, ensuring that the supplier data is current and up to date.
    • Supplier case and contact management: Create and manage supplier cases, add, and manage supplier contacts.
    • Minimize risk during supplier onboarding: Identify and assess potential supplier risks when onboarding new suppliers.
    • Manage supplier relationship and performance: Monitor and assess supplier performance by setting up criteria for measuring supplier performance though KPIs and thresholds.
    • Many-to-many (M2M) mapping between supplier contact and suppliers: A single supplier contact can be the contact for multiple suppliers, if those suppliers share a parent-subsidiary relationship.
      Important:
      M2M mapping between supplier contact and suppliers is available from the Xanadu December 2024 release onwards. To enable M2M mapping, see Enable M2M mapping between supplier contact and suppliers.

    For more information about installing Supplier Lifecycle Operations, see Install Supplier Lifecycle Operations.

    Supplier Lifecycle Operations applications

    Supplier Lifecycle Operations includes the following applications.

    Application Description
    Supplier Common Architecture Provides a common architecture to track data objects related to a supplier used in both Supplier Lifecycle Operations and Supplier Collaboration Portal.
    Source-to-Pay Workspace
    Important:
    Starting with the Washington D.C. release, Supplier Manager Workspace is being prepared for future deprecation. It’s hidden from the navigation and no longer is activated on new instances but will continue to be supported. Source-to-Pay Workspace provides the latest experience for this functionality.
    		 Enables you to centralize supplier information and collaborate with suppliers to improve performance.
    Craft.co Integration for Supplier Lifecycle Operations Provides a preconfigured integration with Craft.co. Craft.co is a supplier intelligence platform that offers validated and comprehensive information about suppliers with which a company engages.
    News Integration for Supplier Lifecycle Operations Retrieve recent news and other articles from preferred news channels. There’s a preconfigured integration with Microsoft Bing available with this application.
    Advanced Work Assignment for Supplier Lifecycle Operations Automatically assign supplier cases to agents based on availability and capacity.
    Risk Assessments Integration for Supplier Lifecycle Operations Provides an integration with the Third-party Risk Management (TPRM) application to conduct due diligence when onboarding new suppliers.
    Supplier Collaboration Portal Provides a single, one-stop experience for suppliers to get self-service, complete tasks and make requests into an organization.
    Supplier Relationship and Performance Management Enables you to establish clear expectations and criteria for measuring supplier performance, monitor, and assess their performance against those criteria.

    Supplier Lifecycle Operations functional architecture diagram

    The following figure shows a high-level illustration of the various components that make up the functional architecture of Supplier Lifecycle Operations.

    Figure 1. Supplier Lifecycle Operations functional architecture diagram
    This figure illustrates the functional architecture diagram of Supplier Lifecycle Operations.

    Helpful resources

    Here are some additional ServiceNow resources that can help you:
    Release Notes
    Learn more about what's new and changed. See the Supplier Lifecycle Operations release notes.
    ServiceNow University
    Access real-time courses, self-paced training, and career resources, such as SLO Implementation Essentials and more, from ServiceNow University.
    Now Create
    Log in to your ServiceNow account and find additional information about implementing and deploying Supplier Lifecycle Operations features at Now Create.
    YouTube
    Learn more about the value that you can add to your business with the Source-to-Pay suite. Watch Multiply the value of your ServiceNow platform with Source-to-Pay workflows on YouTube.
    ServiceNow Community
    Connect with other Supplier Lifecycle Operations users at ServiceNow Community.