Table of contents
Key Takeaways
- Supplier networks have grown larger more complex. As a result, unstructured collaboration via phone calls, spreadsheets, and email is no longer sufficient for ensuring timely coordination and accountability.
- Multienterprise work management software provides a digital, network-driven approach to coordinating workflows and business rules and sharing critical information across teams and companies.
Every day, your supplier management team tackles a seemingly endless variety of supplier quality issues and unexpected problems that have a direct impact on the business’s ability to deliver products on time and in full. Your team is the most critical player in ongoing efforts to improve the quality of both products and business processes.
The moment a supplier business process defect or product quality defect is identified, your team has to jump into action, work closely with key stakeholders from inside and outside the organization, and take the necessary steps to ensure the best possible outcome.
In short, ensuring consistent supplier quality is a constant challenge, and the ability to collaborate closely and effectively with suppliers is a critical success factor. But the standard tools and methods used to manage supplier issues—phone calls, emails, video meetings, and spreadsheets—are likely holding you back, slowing you down, and making it increasingly difficult to maintain or exceed quality standards.
Some of the main reasons why resolving business process and product quality defects with suppliers is so time consuming and cumbersome include:
- Unclear issue resolution processes
- Poor visibility at the management level
- Reporting delays
- No institutional memory to support continuous improvement
- Failure to get the right people involved
- Unstructured collaboration and decentralized information sources
At the same time, supplier networks have grown larger and far more complex—and unstructured collaboration is no longer sufficient for ensuring timely coordination and accountability. Traditional business applications like enterprise resource planning and quality management systems were not designed for sharing data and collaborating with business partners from outside your organization.
Supplier relationship management teams need a new and vastly more efficient way to easily connect and collaborate with supply networks—a digital source of truth that provides visibility and clarity for all network partners and ensures high levels of structured, workflow-based coordination.
Whether it’s a product quality problem or business process defect, the challenge remains the same: There has never been an easy way to orchestrate shared work that cuts across internal departments and requires close collaboration with suppliers—until now.
The answer is multienterprise work management, a new type of network-based collaboration software designed specifically for the unique needs of supply chains. With multienterprise work management on a digital supply network, product quality and business process issues are resolved faster, disruptions and delays are prevented, and change requests are handled with greater speed and effectiveness. And those are just some of the benefits of digitalizing your supplier network with a multienterprise work management solution.
What is multienterprise work management?
Multienterprise work management software provides a digital, network-driven approach to coordinating workflows and business rules and sharing critical information across teams and companies. With multienterprise work management, you can create process-driven networks of key stakeholders from inside and outside of your organization to ensure everyone is clear on roles, responsibilities, and project timelines. Processes like quality document reviews, managing change controls, tracking and resolving unexpected issues, and batch record reviews all run faster and with less effort with the help of a multienterprise work management solution.
Whether it’s managing the production management process or contending with supplier quality problems, multienterprise work management helps you make sure that cross-functional and cross-company business processes are executed quickly and efficiently.
Download our new handbook for more information on supply chain issue management.
