The Inovis Blog

Matt Pritchett sent me his second blog post this morning. Matt will be posting more pieces in the future, so keep an eye out for him!

Isn’t the sound of ringing cash registers music to your ears once a vendor is on-boarded? Wouldn’t life be so much better if getting us to the point of hearing the cash register wasn’t so long and arduous? I have been fortunate to be a part of several vendor compliance on-boarding programs. Here are a few things I learned that will hopefully help you and your community…

1. Buyers, EDI staff, and DC teams PLEASE sing in tune. If you don’t, the song doesn’t sound good. Have a unified and consistent message that is communicated to the community at all levels of interaction from buying merchandise, to explaining routing guides, and the shipment/receipt of product. If you heard a song for the first time and it sounded horrible, wouldn’t you turn the channel or start singing the song in your own tune? On a side note, I have always been musically declined, so please don’t ask me to sing along.

2. Have the songs listed so that the listener knows what is playing next. Determine what the community needs to know in advance of the on-boarding kickoff. This could include EDI routing guides, label/packing information, product tagging, required/optional product attributes for the Catalogue, DC/store numbers/addresses, contact information, and required documents based on what you are buying from the vendor.

3. Parental guidelines reduce product time to consumer and revenue recognition. Determine exceptions—because there are usually always vendors that fall into this bucket. This is huge! Don’t require a vendor to go through a compliance effort if, in the end, the product they sell to you doesn’t follow the same guidelines and they have to start the process again.

4. Explicit lyrics make things so much simpler (in on-boarding, maybe not songs). Communicate to the community the time frame expectations: any rewards for becoming compliant sooner (other than the obvious purchase orders), any penalties for being late (other than the lack of purchase orders).

5. Do you know the words? Know who your vendors are. Knowing which company to contact, what products they are selling to you, who to contact, and how to contact them will get the right people engaged a lot sooner. I know this is much more difficult if you’re starting an on-boarding effort from scratch. In rolling on-boarding efforts, this is not as big of a problem.

I touched on only a few of the considerations during an on-boarding effort. Other things that come to mind include setup of translators/connectivity software, ensuring vendors have a Catalogue and a VAN/direct connection, setup of the trading partner on the VAN or direct connect software you are using—for those of you using IW, a helpful hint is the new self service trading partner setup functionality—and the list goes on, and on, and on…

So before you start an on-boarding effort, continue the effort, or “remix” the requirements—which will start you back at square one with on-boarding. The question is this, “Is community compliance and on-boarding where my strengths are and where I want my resources (people, money, development, etc) focused or should I refocus my efforts toward my core competency and leverage other tools to streamline this process (an example is Inovis’ business community management and compliance tools)?”

So, what are other items that impact communities singing in tune, a.k.a. what are things that have helped or hurt during your on-boarding efforts?