I am curious if any of you are being inundated with requests from your customers to use their portals and how you are handling these requests.
I work for a manufacturing company and I am responsible for completing the required paperwork from customers needed in order to become an approved supplier. We are already vetted though the Systems for Award Management ?SAM? which certifies government suppliers ensuring that vendors comply with all government requirements with regard to all legal, quality, safety, etc. so this information is already available however more and more of our customers are insisting that we register with their supply chain portals as a requirement of doing business with them. Some of these portals are very time consuming and require many documents to be uploaded to the portal, some of which do not even apply to us. Often there is not an option to skip a question or enter ?N/A?. You are simply ?stuck? until you make something up to move to the next question. Some are so involved that there are webinars to train suppliers to use them.
Sometimes a customer will waive the portal requirement and order from us anyway because they need our parts. Long story short: we are a small company and do not have the time or resources to jump through hoops just to get paid for goods/services that we have invoiced. We are considering imposing fees for initial registration and subsequent annual updates as well as administrative fees for each order that we must invoice via the portal (login, upload, submit ? ALL of which can be PAINFULLY SLOW and often time out because the portals cannot handle the traffic).
Are any of you experiencing the same dilemma? Any thoughts or suggestions?
Submitted by: Violet
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Gosh, your post just described my day-to-day! Because we are a small privately held Manufacturer of a very small niche market, we have a unilateral "No portal" policy and request customers to send us forms to fill out. My issue is maintaining all the passwords (and password requirements!).
Mostly this works for us. Other than SAM, we have one exception and that is Exostar. We do incorporate the fees and time costs into the quotes for the three or four customers that use it.
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Chandra Meyers on
7/5/2018 12:39:10 PM
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I like the idea of imposing a fee, especially since you are a small company and like you said do not have the time and resources to spend on this. Good idea!
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Courtney Brownfield on
1/10/2018 8:46:55 AM
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