5 Must-Have Workflows for Legal Operations, Part 3: Vendor Onboarding

Why automate Vendor Onboarding?

Employees and vendors both lose when email-centered processes lead to missed steps and employee errors. Compliance risks begin to multiply, and simple mistakes that should be caught, like missed fields and misaligned names, can creep under the radar until it’s time for a company audit.

Transparency is paramount to ensuring these risks and errors are kept to a minimum. The overall process of vendor onboarding consists of several sub-processes, and this can be another challenge of having different systems in place.

If stakeholders can’t easily pinpoint where a process stands, they will invariably face hurdles. Those cause a variety of inefficiencies such as needless delays and broken communication chains.

Streamline the process for immediate benefits

The solution is to streamline onboarding and ensure that the correct vendor information is entered and syncs with enterprise-wide systems, is compliant with all internal and external policies, and that the onboarding protocols your teams follow are complete and have a verified audit trail.

Digitizing manual processes (including all the forms and agreements required by vendors) makes it easier and an overall less painful experience for both vendors and employees.

Handling problematic vendors can be tough, once they’re part of your vendor ecosystem.  With the right workflow, you can capture vital information that might prevent those headaches in the first place.

With the right workflow automation solution, accelerating the vendor onboarding process is (relatively) simple, with nearly instant benefits:

• Design and launch an easy-to-use vendor onboarding form that tracks, triages, and automates vendor onboarding requests.
• Workflows and forms can be easily created in a drag-and-drop UI, specifying routing, stakeholders, and notifications at every stage.
• Ensure that your company’s data governance standards are applied throughout the requests, from initial screening through audit trail capabilities.
• Workflows can be modified or updated on the fly, a crucial factor in staying compliant with ever-evolving rules and regulations.
• Documents and files that are relevant to each collaboration are centralized in one repository, not scattered with poor version control.
• All collaborators involved at the correct time and in authoritative sequence.
• Processes repeat correctly every time, in standardized way, no matter how complicated.
• Central dashboards provide superior monitoring and governance of all vendor-related processes.