The TYS platform will be temporarily unavailable due to maintenance from July 26, 8:30 pm GMT, to July 27, 12:30 pm GMT. We apologize for any inconvenience.
The TYS platform will be temporarily unavailable due to maintenance from July 26, 8:30 pm GMT, to July 27, 12:30 pm GMT. We apologize for any inconvenience.

FAQ: Why Supplier Management?

Frequently Asked Question: Why did Trust Your Supplier choose to tackle supplier management?

We realized that there was a large gap in the reliability of supplier data. With today’s supply chain risks, volatility in supply, and the increased regulatory situation, traditional methods to discover, onboard and monitor suppliers can’t keep up with the pace of changing information. 

Fundamental to all supply chains is the “supplier”. Globalization requires proper vetting and risk assessment of suppliers across a broad spectrum of subject areas to ensure trust, transparency, and compliance with global regulations 

The pandemic has demonstrated that a lack of supplier diversity and reliance on one or two concentrated suppliers can lead to a total supply disruption, higher costs, and process inefficiencies. As part of their material risk and qualification assessments, investors, buyers, and consumers are requiring suppliers to demonstrate ESG and sustainability initiatives.  

Our parent company, Chainyard, believes that a blockchain-powered solution such as Trust Your Supplier is foundational to the future of supplier management. 

Trust Your Supplier Whitepaper Download

For Trust Your Supplier, blockchain isn’t just a buzzword. It’s the technology we are using to lead the way from today’s portal-based ecosystem to a true, universally consumable supplier digital identity. 

Download the free whitepaper to learn more about our technology and the many benefits to both procurement organizations and supplier companies.

https://trustyoursupplier.com/resources/whitepaper/ 

 

9 Ways to Know Procurement Has Outgrown Excel 

Microsoft Excel is a great product that has been the mainstay of business data and calculations tools for decades. It’s easily available, considerably stable, and most computer-savvy users can learn it. However, it does have limitations, and as your business grows, you’ll notice some disadvantages when relying solely on Excel. So how can you tell if your procurement department has outgrown Excel and needs a different technology? 

Read more about this topic on the Buyers Meeting Point blog at 

https://www.buyersmeetingpoint.com/digital-transformation/entry/9-ways-to-know-procurement-has-outgrown-excel 

#digitalprocurement #supplierrelationshipmanagement #digitaltransformation #BuyersMeetingPoint

Good Advice From Joyce Harkness

In the United States, we will be celebrating Thanksgiving this week. Our time is spent sharing food and other traditions with family and friends.  As I’ve been making preparations, I remembered some family-themed advice given to me by Joyce Harkness. 

Joyce joined me on an episode of the Procurement Block podcast and as a single, working mother offered up this tip for managing work and family:  “We have a shared online family calendar. At the beginning of each school year, we would put the usual school and family events in the calendar. And then it helps us then have conversations about who’s attending what.”

Joyce was such a pleasure to have on the show. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to her episode on Supplier Information Management, you can check it on below.

Happy Thanksgiving!

https://trustyoursupplier.com/procurement-block/podcast-s1e4/ 

Digital Transformers: Supplier Management Using Blockchain

Historically, procurement has considered themselves the ‘gatekeepers’ for enterprise contracts and supplier relationships. Information was regarded as power, especially if it could give them an upper hand in supplier negotiations. That paradigm no longer works.

Today’s procurement organizations are not only beginning to empower distributed buyers to make more and more independent decisions about suppliers, they are working towards stronger, more trust-based partnerships with those suppliers.

In this episode of Digital Transformers, powered by Supply Chain Now, hosts Kevin L. Jackson and Kelly Barner welcome Gary Storr and April Harrison with Trust Your Supplier to the podcast to discuss supplier management using blockchain:

· The importance of establishing mutual trust in a digitally transformed business environment and how specific technologies can help companies achieve that at scale

· How blockchain can not only increase the trust factor of supplier information, it can also prevent suppliers from having to manually make updates across a range of customer systems

· Ways in which the past year has helped procurement see just how reliant they are on their suppliers

Listen to the episode here.

The Value of a Blockchain-Based Identity

by April Harrison

A trusted supplier identity is the keystone of our Trust Your Supplier (TYS) platformTYS provides organizations a trusted exchange of information across an encrypted blockchain environment to minimize risk & fraud throughout the onboarding and life cycle of partnerships. Our value proposition relies on ensuring identity control and privacy for network participants. 

The exchange of information is crucial to business operations in all industries. Conventional systems are open to fraud, error and inefficiency. These manual processes lack data security and each participant has their own separate database, or ledger — increasing the possibility of human error or fraud. Shared databases cannot prevent malicious activity. Hacked entities can corrupt or destroy data in the shared database, making it invalid for everyone involved. 

Blockchain is designed for trust and secure trading, reducing vulnerabilities. It provides clear provenance and a single, shared, tamper-evident ledger. Once recorded, transactions cannot be altered. This is ideal for supporting auditing capabilities as it provides an immutable relationship history between parties. 

The TYS supplier profile data is sovereign, owned & controlled by the supplier, who can selectively share additional profile information with companies they choose to connect with on the network. 

This single, digital identity for suppliers can be shared with multiple buyers and business networks. A 2-tiered supplier profile approach allows suppliers to be discovered by new customers without handing over unlimited access to their data. 

To learn more about this innovative new approach to supplier identity that is transforming supplier relationships, please visit www.TrustYourSupplier.com 

Nokia Announcement

Nokia Officially Launches Onboarding of Suppliers into Trust Your Supplier

Nokia, a leader in the telecom industry, has announced the availability for their suppliers to transition to Trust Your Supplier as part of their digital strategy. By adapting TYS, Nokia aims to improve and expedite Nokia’s supplier qualification, validation, & life-cycle information management. Sanjay Mehta, Nokia’s VP Mobiles Networks Strategy talks about how TYS will be a game-changer for Nokia in this video.

By joining TYS, Nokia’s suppliers will benefit by eliminating manual repetitive process, experiencing an acceleration of qualification & onboarding processes, and gain the potential for new business opportunities.

“Working with IBM and Chainyard on this blockchain initiative represents a great opportunity for Nokia to further enhance our suppliers’ experience and optimize the onboarding process,” said Sanjay Mehta, Vice President Mobile Networks Strategic Sourcing, Nokia. “Using the latest technology to address a classical challenge will be of benefit for everyone, and further increase the speed of using innovative solutions.”

Trust Your Supplier values this partnership and welcomes Nokia, along with their suppliers, to the TYS network.

Learn more at www.TrustYourSupplier.com/Nokia

Assessing the Risk of a New Supplier Relationship

Supplier Relationship Management isn’t necessarily a new concept, but in today’s COVID-related, digital climate, its scope and structure should be formalized and followed diligently. Instead of a transactional interaction and a contract that gets shoved in a filing cabinet until renewal, GEP states that the nature of the vendor/supplier relationships is shifting to just that: relational. Long-term.  A constant conversation that lasts throughout the contract – not just at the endpoints.  Now, of course in any relationship there is risk. 

Without diligence or with diligence only executed at the endpoints, it is much harder to figure out where the relationship went wrong if problems occurCNN reported that the HHS’ Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response misappropriated the millions of dollars allocated to the Biomedical AdvanceResearch for administrative and office expenses, dubbing it the Bank of BARDA. If misappropriation and mistakes can happen in an organization with that degree of oversight, they can happen anywhere.   

Gaps in normalcy like shipping delays, business shutdowns, limited manufacturing capabilities, and a higher-than-average online population gives a fraudster the perfect opportunity to slide in. So how can you identify whether your supplier is one you can count on?  

GDC agrees with the PWC categorization risks in a supplier relationship.  The risks are broken up into five segments:  

Reputational Risk 
A reputational risk means your business’ brand is affected. This can happen when the end-user experiences a product failure or substandard quality as a result of a bad supplier.  

Resilience Risk 
Resilience risks affect the customer’s access to the product because of a bad supplier. This can happen if a crucial part of your product is missing, and you must deem it out of stock. 

Data Security and Privacy Risk  
63% of data breaches happen from third party access, so strict security measures should be enforced in order to prevent stolen customer, employee, or partner data  

Regulatory Risk 
Regulatory risks happen when a business violates the country- or jurisdiction-specific compliance requirements for outsourcing or signing with a supplier.  

Commercial risk
Commercial risk can happen when supplier failure results in inaccurate or over billing, or when the costs of the supplier partnership is larger than the profit.  

Now that you know your risks, it is time to think about how to solidify your process for supplier management and risk prevention.  

Luckily, there are a few best practices and guidelines out there to lay the groundwork 

Vendor Selection 
This is where we come in. Global Data Consortium is a data-as-a-service company that delivers real-time, locally sourced business verification for financial institutions around the globe to combat reputational, regulatory, and commercial risksWhen you use GDC’s Know Your Business solution, you can choose from three types of checks with varying levels of verification and customizable match rules to meet whatever level of compliance your organization requires.  

The key to a successful supplier relationship is to never let the bad ones get to you in the first place.  Whether you’re seeking to verify the legitimacy of a potential supplier, conduct a risk analysis, or confirm the beneficial owners and directors, GDC’s KYB solution helps you kick your supplier relationship management process off with a head start.  

Contract  
Setting a contract up with your supplier means setting expectations up with your supplier. Make sure both parties are aware of the duration of the partnership, quantity of work, and quality of service expected.  

Vendor Management 
As stated above, the nature of a supplier relationship is shifting. Monitor your partnership throughout the life of it and keep an open line of communication.  

Contingency Planning 
Even with all the precautions listed above, things can still go wrong. If a supplier falls through, have a backup plan so you can still avoid a resilience risk.  

And there you have it! Although every organization has its own structure, these best practices should set the groundwork for what will be an exceptional supplier relationship management process.  

Want to start your supplier relationship management process off on the right foot? Check out our page to learn more about how GDC’s Know Your Business solution can help you minimize Regulatory, Reputational, and Commercial risks for a supplier relationship you can be confident in.  

RapidRatings for Supply Chain Risk Managers: This Moment is Yours (and The Next One Too)

by RapidRatings

In painting, there is an oft-used technique where colors, lines, and shapes are applied with increasing or decreasing intensity to create atmospheric distance. This technique obscures images by imitating the conditions produced in the atmosphere: fog, clouds, mist, and even gloom.

In Supply Chain (writ large), there is also a type of atmospheric perspective.

More so than just the snapshots of cargo moving through air, land, or sea—risk management views can be obscured by great time-distances or (potentially) illusory information that underpins a given outlook.

But in your role, you can’t have that. You need an unobstructed view; one dependent on clear, reliable information to manage risk in its many forms. Real data matters.

Even pre-pandemic, the world was getting riskier. And the decisions that supply chain risk managers made on any given day, were made more complex by changing weather patterns, natural disasters, new cybersecurity threats, and dynamic changes in international trade.

With the pandemic, that complexity has multiplied; and your role made even tougher. And “Supply chain” is now at the tip of everyone’s tongues (even consumers).

Your perspective (the supply-chain-risk-management one), has never been more important.

But to meet this moment (and inevitably the next), you’ll need accurate data, unblurred by false flags like share price or payment statements; not to mention, a standard scale to compare the financial health of your suppliers across your portfolio; and finally, a discreet, secure network of supplier information that allows suppliers to proactively, and objectively, communicate with you and your team.

Because—for most enterprises—supply chain resiliency starts and stops with you. And you should have the data and analytics tools that support all of those (ever-more-public) responsibilities, regardless of industry or geography, and beyond the day-to-day of on time/on spec fulfillment.

This is your moment. How will you make your mark?

Save time and resources by outsourcing your private company supplier financials to a company that has a track record of discretion and success—in over 150 countries.

Conduct accurate, comparable (and sharable) assessments with accurate scoring based on 73 efficiency and resilience ratios, 24 industry models, and decades of data from companies that have not only defaulted or filed for bankruptcy—but those that have survived and thrived.

Have meaningful conversations (internally and externally) with automated reporting that includes talking points in a relationship-centric dialogue, so you can ask the right questions—with or without financial expertise.

Connect the dots of supplier information management with an advanced data and analytics platform,  Trust Your Supplier, that integrates validated risk information into supplier profiles for advanced insights, accelerated onboarding, and trusted exchange of information.  

And dissipate the fog; get an early warning on public and private suppliers, alike, through predictive technology that’s purpose-built to have more meaningful business relationships—by mitigating and solving challenges before they turn into disruptions and dramatically impact or break the bottom line.

To learn more about how RapidRatings with Trust Your Supplier can help support supply chain risk management in the pandemic era, please click here.