Using Order.co to Streamline Your Vendor Relationships

Systematizing vendor relationships makes the procurement process easier and more cost-effective. But what if you work with vendors that don’t offer online ordering options? You might assume there’s no way to automate procurement and capture spend data in these vendor relationships. Fortunately, the right procurement solution can integrate every vendor within your procurement function, even if they conduct business with a phone call or a handshake.

The right procurement solution allows buyers to work how and when they want with their preferred supply chain partners. To learn more about bringing together great technology and the human touch in vendor relationships, we sat down with VP of Marketing, Eric Hann, to learn how Order.co combines the best of both worlds for stakeholders and suppliers.

Download the free tool: Vendor Risk Management Checklist

How does procurement management improve the vendor experience?

Procurement teams and individual stakeholders spend a surprising amount of time sourcing vendors and ordering products for operations. Organizations may work with dozens or even hundreds of vendors across every spending category, and a procurement management solution like Order.co takes the busywork out of purchasing. It gives every buyer a streamlined way to identify and acquire each supply and service they need.

But when it comes to managing offline transactions, many buyers believe they can’t use procurement software. Yet, as Eric points out, Order.co “works with every vendor, online or offline.”

In fact, Order.co partners with clients to achieve full procurement automation and visibility, regardless of how vendors operate their business. Whether on a connected marketplace API (application program interface) or over the phone, Order.co makes it easier for buyers and vendors to work together.

What challenges do organizations face in managing vendors?

As an organization evolves, its vendor landscape becomes more complex. Purchasing challenges in growing companies often center around buying, tracking, and paying for supplies, then capturing the resulting spend data to improve future procurement efforts.

Vendor management: Organizations with an expanding vendor pool often struggle to manage the ever-increasing number of supplier relationships. Keeping track of orders, product delivery schedules, payment terms, and pricing changes can be overwhelming. And it’s not any easier for small organizations that don’t have the resources to track these details adequately. A centralized platform gathers all procurement data and activities in one place so teams can gain more visibility into each relationship and its value to the company.

Item sourcing: Sourcing supplies without an existing vendor relationship can be particularly challenging. Smaller organizations may lack visibility into the quality of supplies, leading to the purchase of lower-grade products. Because they also don’t buy at a high volume, these organizations may not have access to the best costs from vendors. Therefore, buyers in smaller organizations can benefit from using a procurement management tool to gain the best pricing, terms, quality, and service.

Order processing: For many organizations, manually processing vendor orders is a struggle. This time-consuming approach requires teams to track each order — from supplier selection to product delivery — to ensure that the items and service meet expectations. Manual processing also results in increased errors that can be costly and time-consuming to research and remedy.

Manual order processing is also incredibly difficult for organizations with limited resources, as substantial time and effort are required to stay up-to-date on each step of the procurement process to ensure all related documents are properly organized. Because vendors handle orders through different means — online, over the phone, through email, or even via fax — manually streamlining the process across all vendors is a challenge.

Transaction handling: Tracking transactions, reconciling payments, and reporting on spend are excessively demanding if you don’t have an organized approach. Without a system that tallies the total amount spent on goods and services from vendors, companies may have difficulty reporting and categorizing spend accurately. An automated system makes tracking every order and reconciling each payment easier.

Issue resolution: It’s not always easy to source quality replacement items for integral supplies when your vendor goes out of stock. Searching for acceptable alternatives causes extra work for the procurement team or stakeholders, and finding a backup vendor is so time consuming that many buyers feel forced to cut corners in the sourcing process. A procurement management system like Order.co automatically suggests available options and makes it easy to start the order process.

What are the benefits of working with Order.co for procurement management?

Order.co gives organizations an easy way to interface with every vendor they use. The platform also creates other benefits for organizations that help them use money wisely and track spending effortlessly.

Data accuracy

Order.co's procurement management platform streamlines spend management, from product selection to invoice review and payment. When these processes are automated, it not only saves time and resources but also ensures greater accuracy in accounting and purchasing data. Order.co's automated platform even helps organizations comply with audit requirements and regulations by maintaining accurate data for accounting and purchasing processes.

Spend visibility

Order.co provides vital visibility into an organization's total spend by enabling it to keep tabs on all spending in one place. This helps stakeholders make informed decisions about budget allocation and identify cost-saving opportunities. Additionally, Order.co helps reduce manual effort by eliminating the need for multiple spreadsheets and other forms of record keeping.

Access to products

Every company has a list of vendors it prefers to work with. Order.co makes it easy to add and buy from any vendor you choose — whether they’re online or not. In the case of an offline vendor, an Order.co representative can make contact, set up fulfillment and payment, and record the transaction to maintain total spend visibility.

Buyers can also find items through Order.co’s curated list of preferred vendors and products. In the event of backstock or low inventory, the platform allows buyers to search for exact or similar items available through other trusted vendors. Finding replacement items is automatically powered by a dynamic AI algorithm that selects the best pricing and terms with no extra steps on the user's part. If the replacement item is acceptable, users can complete the transaction with the click of a button, just as with their customary vendor.

GL coding

Manually processing purchases requires the accounting department to hand code every transaction to ensure accuracy in the general ledger (GL). Order.co eliminates this time-consuming and error-prone process by coding every transaction automatically and accurately. With correctly labeled transactions, stakeholders have real-time visibility into how and where departments spend, which helps Finance keep budgets on track to ensure spend optimization remains high.

Time savings

Time is one thing you can’t make more of. With a procurement platform, stakeholders spend less time completing and chasing orders and more time performing other critical functions. Using Order.co, every layer of an organization can eliminate time-consuming tasks, such as:

Purchase order creation, approval, and processing
Vendor evaluation and communications
Spend reconciliation and expense reporting
Account order and payment processing

Shadow spend prevention

Simplifying the order process has the downstream effect of reducing out-of-policy spending. With a centralized platform, buyers can get everything from high-quality vendors in a central location. Giving teams tools to procure their preferred products efficiently reduces the chance they will try to meet procurement needs elsewhere.

How does Order.co work with vendors?

Order.co is a vendor-agnostic solution to the ordering process that works regardless of the vendor or their order placement process. “The platform is really ecommerce-as-a-service,” explains Eric, meaning it makes it easy to place, approve, track, and report on every transaction from every vendor flowing through your organization.

While nearly half of B2B purchases are made online and almost two-thirds of B2B companies are set up for complete online transactions, some vendors still rely on email or phone ordering for fulfillment. Order.co can help buyers successfully work with them via a browser plugin, automated emails, or a marketplace API. If necessary, Order.co will even contact vendors directly on your behalf.

Browser plugin

The Order.co browser plugin enables one-click purchasing from any vendor website. With the ability to add items to their carts directly, buyers avoid cumbersome third-party or manual checkout processes. Instead, the browser plugin provides an intuitive interface to kick off purchases while delivering all the features of Order.co.

Email

Electronic purchase orders are still one of the most common ways vendors process orders. With Order.co, buyers can select the items they want through the platform and route them through the purchase approval workflows. On the back end, Order.co generates and submits a purchase order to the correct vendor email address and records the transaction in the platform. The transaction and payment are processed through whatever supported payment method works best for the buyer and vendor.

Marketplace APIs

Marketplace APIs allow buyers and vendors to connect and exchange orders and payment information electronically. Through API integrations, buyers access the ordering system of their vendor to place orders, confirm quantities, and update pricing, all within the Order.co platform.

This process is much faster than manually entering purchase orders into an email or making phone calls, and it eliminates potential miscommunications. Marketplace APIs also allow for more accurate purchase order management and payments, as all the information is stored securely on the platform.

Direct contact

Despite the increasing digitization of procurement, some purchases still need a personal touch. A direct interface may be especially important for large-dollar equipment orders or vendors with long-standing client relationships.

While many buyers believe there’s no way to streamline such purchases, Order.co makes getting what buyers need from a direct-contact vendor easy. In these cases, a representative makes the call, places the order, handles any paperwork, and captures the transaction in the platform for future reporting and reconciliation. This saves time and attention for busy buyers and accounting stakeholders, ensures the best savings on needed items, and maintains accuracy in spend reporting for better decision-making on every future transaction.

Can Order.co record transactions we handle internally?

In some cases, stakeholders may want to engage a long-time vendor independently. We’re often asked if Order.co can ensure spend visibility in these cases. “We can still process the transactions and allow you to maintain the relationship,” explains Eric. “We’re not just vendor agnostic. We’re fulfillment agnostic. We can record the transactions for visibility and control.”

Order.co makes it easy to include transaction data from every purchase in spend reporting, even when it doesn’t originate in the platform. This allows buyers to work with vendors in the best way for them while maintaining the integrity and completeness of organizational spend data.

What if we don’t have a vendor for a procurement need?

Startups and fast-growing companies don’t always have the contacts to source products efficiently. Whether a company is getting a new business off the ground or expanding its offering, Order.co can help match them up with a supplier ready to meet their needs.

“We find vendors that we know are particularly excellent in quality, pricing, and service, and work with them to build arrangements.” This access is helpful to clients at any stage of the procurement journey, especially those just starting. “If you don’t have relationships with a vendor,” says Eric, “we can recommend the best.”

How does Order.co implement vendor setup?

As a system designed to help increase efficiency, getting started with a spend management and procurement platform needs to be a simple process. That’s why Order.co makes it easy for new users to capture their current vendor relationships within the system and use the data they already have to achieve better spend optimization.

1. Capture existing vendor data

The Order.co onboarding team gathers data from every vendor order placed within the past 90 days. Using this information, we create a catalog of every product your organization purchases, making it easy for buyers within your company to find and access the best products for them.

The platform also makes it easy to add new products and vendors at any time.

2. Get spend optimization support

Spend analysis is critical to building a resilient and cost-effective procurement process. During implementation, the spend analysis team works to identify mission-critical items and ways to make these important purchases more efficient and affordable.

The spend analysis team takes a personalized approach to onboarding — seeking to understand brands, sensitivity, and preferences — and working within those parameters to source and curate high-quality products for the order catalog. The team can also make suggestions about volume ordering and product flexibility to enhance optimization further.

3. Access the Order.co network

Need better pricing on a commonly purchased item or access to a similar or exact replacement when a vendor goes out of stock? As one of the leading procurement management software solutions, Order.co has access to scale pricing through over $4,000,000,000+ in purchasing power. Our customers have access to the same benefits as part of the Order.co service.

This access to high-quality, price-competitive vendors creates opportunities to consolidate purchasing for high-volume items and take advantage of the best prices available on the market, no matter your organization’s size or procurement needs.

Improve your vendor experiences with Order.co

For organizations ready to improve the purchasing process and bring all their vendors together in one place, Order.co offers a streamlined and cost-effective solution.

Want to learn more? Start with a demo of Order.co.

Get started

Schedule a demo to see how Order.co can simplify buying for your business.

"*" indicates required fields