How to Create Your Vendor Management Workflow using Kissflow?

Playing a key part in ensuring the efficiency and speed of the procure-to-pay cycle, vendor management helps you weed out poorly performing vendors, and make the right choices consistently.

However, vendor management can be tricky to keep track of because procurement teams tend to be constantly busy. Each member typically handles a number of deals at various stages in the procure-to-pay cycle, leaving the door open to errors in judgment due to the sheer volumes and the mental load of managing vendors, orders, products/services, and documentation.

A simple fix is to streamline your procurement process using the power of workflows. Kissflow lets you do this in 4 simple steps, and you can get this done in as little as 15 minutes!

Creating Your Vendor Management Workflow on Kissflow

To illustrate how easy it is to create a workflow, here’s an example: vendor registration, one of the primary elements under the ‘vendor management’ umbrella.

Step 1: Design forms to collect data

With Kissflow’s easy-to-use form designer, you can create fluid forms that look and function just the way you want them to. Use these to capture data such as:

• Legal business name
• Organization type
• Tax details
• Vendor address
• Contact details
• Bank transfer details
• Products offered, with a separate field to collect detailed descriptions of products
• Certificates/documentation required for registration

You can set data to be collected in a number of formats, and set Kissflow to capture and store data on master documents. Customized forms mean that data can be entered into simple text fields, onto tables you create within the form, or even as attached files.

Step 2: Define the workflow

This is the stage where you define how the payload gets transferred. In this case, the payload is the data that we collected in the forms. You might want to get the collected data approved by the respective purchase manager. Then, you might want to get it re-checked by the purchase head.

The various steps here could include:

• Data collection
• Purchase manager verification
• Purchase head approval

In Kissflow procurement software, workflows are created the simplest way: using simple drag-and-drop tools. These let you add and modify workflow elements like rule-based logic and the assignment of roles and responsibilities.

You can choose each vendor management workflow designed to mimic the way you do business. Maybe you have a policy that the purchase head need only get involved in vendor relationships above a certain financial value. You can incorporate that condition: vendor registration will skip right past the manager on smaller vendors who can be managed by the purchase managers themselves.

Step 3: Assign permissions and access

In this step, you decide who gets access to which data, and set permissions regarding what they can do with the visible information. You may set the purchase manager to be able to edit the form data on their verification step while choosing to let the purchase head have read-only access as they approve the data.

This access and permission control are especially handy in processes like invoice approval, where you may prefer that only employees of a certain grade view sensitive seller information.

Step 4: Publish your app

Once you’ve created your vendor registration workflow using steps 1 through 3, publishing it and letting your team members use it is a simple click away. You simply decide whether you want to let others edit the workflow even as you’re using it, and then hit ‘publish’.

You can create a number of workflows for vendor management-specific procurement processes like vendor qualification, vendor rating, and vendor offboarding as well.

Why Kissflow?

You can choose to create your own vendor management workflows using the simple 4-step method or use one of the 50+ templates available on the Kissflow platform. You can tweak these to fit into the way your organization takes care of vendor management.

To decide for yourself, take a look at Kissflow procurement cloud.

Recommended Reading:

• The Vendor Management System Buyer’s Guide (Updated Aug 2023)
• Top 3 Vendor Management Tools Every Organization Needs to Consider
• 3 Types of Vendor Management Solutions Your Organization Needs
• Vendor Invoice Management Software