You can’t procure goods and services without vendors, so maintaining quality relationships is the lifeblood of the procurement process. Vendor management systems aid contract, interaction and purchase management to simplify maintaining buyer-supplier relationships.
With that in mind, we’ll take you through our top five analyst-picked vendor management systems.
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Best Vendor Management Systems
Let’s get straight into the reason you’re here — to learn about the best vendor management systems available on the market today.
If you still have questions afterward about whether or not vendor management software is right for you, check out our FAQ section below.
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Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 SCM is a standalone solution catering to organizations of all sizes. It helps you manage your whole supply chain and offers various vendor-focused capabilities, including:
- Onboarding
- Supplier portal
- Catalogs
- Sourcing and collaboration
- Risk identification
- Performance analysis
Mobile Support: Warehouse management mobile application for Android, iOS and Windows devices.
Pricing
Pricing for the cloud or on-premise solution starts at $180/user/month.
Manage and collaborate with suppliers from Dynamic 365 SCM’s vendor dashboard. Source
Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data
- Purchase Contracts Management — 100
- Supplier or Vendor Portal — 100
- Vendor Performance Tracking — 100
- Bill of Materials — 100
- Automatic or Recurring Purchase Orders — 100
Top Benefits
- Maximize Sourcing Opportunities: Access vendor catalog punch-outs and explore similar product or material options to find the best supplier.
- Mitigate Risks: Combines real-time visibility, agile planning and data-driven insights to identify and suggest resolutions to supply chain risks automatically.
- Improve Cost Management: Monitor costs from product and material pricing to actual purchases using a vendor collaboration portal.
- Streamline Procurement: Link vendor catalogs to their profiles in your vendor collaboration portal to quickly access available goods, evaluate prices and submit purchase orders.
- Forecast Demand: Use AI-powered forecasting to predict demand and optimize inventory levels, minimizing overstocking and understocking.
Primary Features
- Onboarding: Request profiles for the vendors you already work with. Collaborate with and purchase from vendors directly within the system upon profile approval and creation.
- Catalogs: Create custom purchasing catalogs for internal use. Add the specific products, materials and services from vendors you want to make available for employee purchase.
- Risk Management: Identify supply risks based on historical vendor data such as performance metrics, delivery date confirmed as requested and on-time in-full deliveries. Automatically view vendors who fall outside set performance goals.
- Performance Monitoring: Create vendor-specific performance goals. Use reports facilitated by Microsoft’s Power BI to monitor vendor performance, ranking, lead time, quality metrics and more.
- Multi-Vendor Sourcing: Divide specific product supplies among various vendors by assigning each a percentage of your total needs. Automatically receive suggestions for planned purchases to reach the specified portions over time.
Limitations
- No multi-screen support.
- Low data storage limits.
- No free trial.
Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data
- Collaborative Supplier Scoring by Team Members — Not Supported
- Build Plan, Resources and Capacity Utilization Matrix — Not Supported
- Demand-at-Risk Drill-Down Visualizations — Not Supported
- Life Cycle Planning — Not Supported
- Proof of Delivery (POD) in Mobile — Supported With Partner Integrations
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management & Manufacturing
Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, a suite solution, caters to organizations of all sizes. The SCM suite includes several vendor-specific capabilities, including:
- Supplier portal
- Supplier qualification
- Sourcing
- Contract life cycle and compliance
- Vendor performance
Mobile Support: N/A
Pricing
Available at various pricing tiers, including an option for a custom pricing quote per feature. Its subscription services’ prices are as follows:
| Oracle Fusion SCM Cloud Services | Monthly Subscription Price |
|---|---|
| Order management | $875 |
| Product management | $500 |
| Product management reviewer | $100 |
| Supply chain execution | $350 |
| Supply planning | $1,250 |
Use Oracle’s supplier collaboration portal to access tasks requiring attention and view recent activity. Source
Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data
- Contract Creation With Vendors — 100
- Maintaining Vendor Record — 100
- Three-Way Match — 100
- Collaborative Supplier Portal — 100
- Creation of Supplier Scorecard — 100
Top Benefits
- Simplify Purchasing & Spend Management: Configure rules for approvals, authorize purchasing from specific vendors, automate purchase order creation and invoice processing, and more to simplify procurement and manage spend.
- Identify Value Opportunities: Use real-time data and reports to identify trends and actionable insights regarding spend, supplier performance, demand and more to drive value-driven decision-making.
- Monitor Performance: Compare actual vendor performance against contractual obligations. Customize supplier benchmarks to receive alerts and assess risk scores. Discover diversification opportunities when suppliers underperform.
- Improve Collaboration: Centralize vendor activities, including communication, document exchange, orders, shipments and invoices, into a single profile with individual portals for vendors and customers.
- Increase Resilience: Monitor supply chains from end to end with percentage and milestone completion. Review vendor performance and evaluate new vendors within the system. Allocate purchases to various vendors to ensure supply when one vendor can’t deliver.
Primary Features
- Supplier Portal: Collaborate with vendors directly in the system. Vendors can access their portal, providing visibility into transactions, electronic invoicing, agreements, purchase orders, advance shipping notifications and more, so they’re up to date with the same information as your organization.
- Supplier Qualification: Monitor supplier compliance with your unique policies. Create custom questionnaires to capture supplier information. Define questionnaire rules to score vendor answers automatically. Assess suppliers as a whole or designate qualifications to specific vendor sites.
- Sourcing: Access and customize guided negotiations using historical data and internal collaboration tools. Automatically average vendor evaluation scores across your organization for a holistic view of department sentiments.
- Contract & Compliance Management: Create contracts directly in the system using guided authoring, pre-approved templates and built-in legal clauses. Manage approval workflows, audit trails, e-signatures and proposed negotiation changes.
- Supplier Performance: Evaluate vendors on contractual obligations vs. performance, such as pricing, services and deliveries. Use a reporting and KPI dashboard to monitor vendor performance at a glance.
Limitations
- No native mobile app.
- No surcharge reflection on purchase orders.
Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data
- Creating Recurring Sales Orders — Not Supported
- Create Quota Arrangement — Not Supported
- Installation Management — Not Supported
- Discrete Picking — Not Supported
- Non-PO Picking — Not Supported
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Coupa
Coupa is a procurement suite solution designed for various positions along the supply chain. It offers a supplier portal and other tools to assist with vendor management processes, such as:
- Collaboration and engagement
- Vendor risk management
- Performance tracking
- Supplier rating assessment
Mobile Support: Native mobile apps for Android and iOS devices.
Pricing
The cloud-based business spend management platform is available at custom pricing. The vendor also offers a free registered supplier portal and verified portal available at $45.75/month (billed annually).
Manage onboarded vendors from Coupa’s supplier dashboard. Source
Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data
- Contract Management — 100
- List of Existing Suppliers — 100
- Message Suppliers — 100
- Supplier Performance Overview — 100
- Supplier Portal — 100
Top Benefits
- Collaborate on Contracts: Involve legal, procurement and other parties in contract creation and negotiation. Collaborate in real-time to ensure vendor contracts meet procurement needs, fall within financial constraints, and adhere to regulatory and legal requirements.
- Increase Visibility: Gain visibility into procurement operations, including approvals, transactions and delays. Provide requesters with real-time updates on where purchase requests are in the approval process.
- Automate Risk Detection: Use AI-driven insights to detect supply risks across your entire vendor network automatically. Monitor viability and performance to drive purchasing decisions.
- Improve Communication: Include messages and attachments directly in sourcing documents, such as purchase orders, for suppliers to review and respond to.
- Drive Supply Chain Initiatives: Use AI to compare your organization’s metrics against others in the Coupa Community. Receive automated suggestions for ways to improve efficiency, profitability and sustainability.
Primary Features
- Supplier Management: Engage with suppliers through automated emails, paper and PDF invoice capturing, cXML support, and more. Track supplier performance through scorecards auto-generated from user ratings in the Coupa Community.
- Risk Management: Identify risks, such as risk flags or possible duplicates, before submitting purchase orders and requests.
- Intelligent Recommendations: Receive automated performance optimization recommendations, including high-risk suppliers to put on hold, alternate suppliers to purchase from and more.
- Change Requests: Make changes to vendor information strictly for internal use or send requests for vendors to update products, catalogs, contact information and more in the system for all community users.
- Multidimensional Ratings: Aggregate information into multidimensional scorecards with data from the Coupa Community and third-party information like financial, judicial, news and screening lists data.
Limitations
- No direct linking between parent contracts and amendments.
- No integration between sourcing and requisition.
- Inability to delete items and suppliers.
Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data
- Sourcing Repository — Not Supported
- Receiving Items as Unordered Receipts — Not Supported
- Intransit Shipment — Not Supported
- Recurring Invoice Discovery and Creation of Payment Plans — Not Supported
- Predictive Analytics To Identify Invoices at Risk of Late Payment — Not Supported
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
IFS Cloud ERP
IFS Cloud ERP is a suite that caters to any company size. It’s customizable to meet the workflows of various industries, such as manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, and wholesale distribution.
The cloud-based solution offers capabilities to handle processes like:
- Supplier management
- Supplier onboarding
- Collaboration
- Performance management
- Agreements
Mobile Support: Native mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Pricing
It’s available at individualized price quotes rather than pre-determined pricing tiers or packages.
Monitor all things procurement, including supplier relationships and information, from IFS Cloud ERP’s procurement dashboard. Source
Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data
- Contract Creation With Vendors — 100
- Maintaining Vendor Record — 100
- Three-Way Match — 100
- Collaborative Supplier Portal — 100
- Customer or Vendor Account Security — 100
Top Benefits
- Eliminate Operational Silos: Centralize business processes into a single platform, including:
- Maintain Agility: Customize modules and enable additional industry-tailored capabilities to the platform as needed, so you’re only paying for what you need.
- Improve Purchase Tracking: Track purchased items from national and international suppliers. Automatically receive alerts for delayed and damaged shipments.
- Automate Processes: Forecast demand and score sales opportunities through embedded machine learning. Use and configure embedded process automation to process and store data automatically.
- Enhance Remote Assistance: Enable augmented reality in video calls to improve remote assistance for field operations.
Primary Features
- Supplier Qualification: Qualify, segment and select suppliers based on your company-specific goals, principles, code of conduct and requirements.
- Supplier Collaboration: Submit RFQs, purchase orders and demand forecasting information to vendors directly within the system. Enable vendor-managed inventory to trusted suppliers to hand off ordering processes for regularly purchased products.
- Onboarding: Register prospective suppliers or select from those already registered. Set goals and compliance regulations with vendors upon selection to mark expectations from the beginning of a customer-supplier relationship.
- Performance Management: Apply ratings across your entire supplier base and perform analysis with built-in auditing tools. Review quality and non-conformance reporting to identify potential risks.
- Agreement Management: Create agreements and contracts with vendors directly in the system. Drill down into specific agreements or view all for a selected vendor.
Limitations
- No free trial.
- No free version.
Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data
- Creation of Supplier Scorecard — Not Supported
- Procurement Report — Not Supported
- Environment, Health and Safety Report — Not Supported
- Partner Relationship Management — Not Supported
- Product Management — Not Supported
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
SYSPRO ERP
SYSPRO ERP, available in SaaS, vendor-hosted and self-hosted deployment, is a resource planning solution for any size business. It facilitates several key vendor management processes, including:
- Preferred supplier selection
- Supplier agreement management
- Request for quote generation
- Return to supplier initiation
- Supplier performance monitoring through a supply chain portal
Mobile Support: SYSPRO Espresso app for Android and iOS.
Pricing
Pricing for the platform varies depending on cloud or on-premise deployment. Plans are as follows:
- Subscription: Approximately $200, determined by users/month/module. There’s an initial licensing fee and an annual fee based on a percentage of the initial license — a minimum one-year contract.
- Perpetual License: Based on the number of concurrent users. Module needs are customizable.
- Core modules — approx. $110,000-120,000
- Add-on modules — approx. $130,000-140,000
- Third-party integrations — approx. $80,000-90,000
The vendor also offers paid learning and training services:
- The SYSPRO Learning Channel is approx. $10,500/year.
- SYSPRO LearnIt Online is available at custom quotes.
Collaborate with suppliers so all parties can monitor and review accounts using SYSPRO ERP’s supplier portal. Source
Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data
- Collaborative Supplier Portal — 100
- Creation of Supplier Scorecard — 100
- Customer or Vendor Account Security — 100
- Project Collaboration — 85
- Maintaining Vendor Record — 85
Top Benefits
- Customize Workflows: Customize your interface, hiding capabilities you don’t need, to simplify processes and match workflows to your unique requirements.
- Control Access: Set and customize access levels so your employees only see what they need. Prevent accidental or incorrect purchases by restricting access to dedicated procurement members.
- Improve Performance Monitoring: Measure internal and supplier performance against your goals. Track production efficiency, inventory turnover, order fulfillment rates, customer satisfaction and more.
- Streamline Purchase Orders: Quickly generate new purchase orders for regularly acquired products or materials by copying data from previous orders.
- Reinforce Sourcing Strategies: Mitigate vendor risks, maintain contracts and improve governance by monitoring current vendors and selecting new ones from approved supplier lists.
Primary Features
- Supply Chain Portal: Centralize supply chain operations into a single source. Purchase and solicit offers for products, materials and services from a vendor network. Store and reference agreements, documentation and communication within the system.
- Supplier Agreements: Establish long-term agreements with suppliers within the system to foster profitable relationships.
- Request for Quote: Submit RFQs to potential suppliers to solicit competitive bids. Automate creation from requisitions and move forward with selected suppliers directly online.
- Supplier Performance: Set custom metrics, such as maturity, typical lead times and capacity, to evaluate supplier performance and identify gaps. Receive automated risk alerts to identify potential issues before they disrupt your supply chain.
- Return to Supplier: Use a quality function to trigger returns during delivery inspections automatically. The system automatically links return documents to their corresponding purchase orders to improve traceability.
Limitations
- No free trial.
- No spell check or searchability for notes.
Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data
- Contract Creation With Vendors — Not Supported
- Procurement Report — Not Supported
- Environment, Health and Safety Report — Not Supported
- Account Management — Not Supported
- Automatic Creation of Purchase Orders — Not Supported
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
FAQs
What are vendor management systems?
Vendor management systems — or software, if you prefer — are solutions for managing and strengthening relationships with the suppliers you rely on for goods and services.
They centralize communication, purchase orders, payments and other key procurement processes so you have a one-stop shop for all things vendor-related.
Vendor management systems are typically built into broader platforms with capabilities beyond fostering successful customer-vendor relationships.
Who uses vendor management software?
Typically, supply chain teams, such as procurement, sourcing and inventory management departments, use vendor management software.
- Procurement: Procurement teams use vendor management tools to monitor the performance of their current supplier base and maintain lasting relationships with quality sources.
- Sourcing: Sourcing teams use vendor management software to identify and qualify suppliers for new and evolving supply needs. They may use it to look into the performance of existing vendors or assess new ones.
- Inventory Management: Inventory management teams use vendor management systems to outsource purchasing. Vendor-managed inventory lets organizations set thresholds for when they need to reorder recurring goods — that way, vendors can take over from there.
But these supply chain teams aren’t the only ones who rely on these platforms. For example, accounting teams can use it to track spending, issue payments and forecast costs for future needs.
Whether a part of the core supply chain management team or another department with a stake in purchasing and vendor performance, these systems come in handy across an organization.
What are the types of vendor management software?
Vendor management systems often come built into platforms with a broader scope. They can come as distinct modules or individual components scattered throughout a platform’s various functionalities.
For starters, our five “best” products listed above fall into three different software categories:
While the three significantly overlap in some functionalities, they each serve distinct needs. So, the type of vendor management system you need will depend on the broader scope of your goals and requirements.
Some other software types you may find vendor management systems built into include:
- Vendor risk management software
- Inventory management software
- Procure-to-pay software
- Purchasing software
- Contract life cycle software
Whatever your overarching goals are should guide your search for a vendor management system as part of a broader platform.
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Next Steps
Vendor management systems can go a long way in helping you create, foster and maintain profitable relationships with your suppliers. From sourcing and procuring goods to tracking performance and analyzing data, they add value across your organization.
If you’re ready to compare these and similar platforms to find the best solution, check out our free comparison report. It lets you generate comprehensive, interactive scorecards to pit solutions’ capabilities against each side by side.
How do you intend to use vendor management software to transform your procurement processes? Let us know in the comments below!
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