Refining Purchasing Management with Aligni’s Vendor Portal

At Aligni, we understand the nuances and complexities that go into making sure the right parts arrive at the right time and at the right place. We also know that it’s not just about managing specifications and orders, it’s also about efficient communication with vendors. This is the basis for the design of Aligni’s vendor portal. The portal is a dedicated interface where both you and your vendors can view and manage RFQ and purchasing activities from a single dashboard.

Better Control and Performance for Buyers

The Aligni vendor portal offers several benefits for buyer/planners to help streamline the procurement process, increase communication, and get more value out of the buying process.

Centralized Management of Open RFQs and POs

No more searching through email accounts or coworkers’ files. The vendor portal is the location where all incoming and outgoing communications between buyers and vendors is available. Items like requests for quotes, purchase orders, timelines, and delivery methods are all managed within the portal. Information can easily be found by searching by date, part number, or vendor.

Use Aligni to Manage Communications with Vendors

The portal provides methods to communicate directly between vendors and purchasing managers. From Aligni’s ActiveQuote, buyers can send RFQs to selected vendors. Vendors have the opportunity to upload their responses into the portal. Buyers can then view, select and commit to purchase from the selected quote via email to the vendor. All of this communication is tracked within Aligni for record keeping and analysis, once again providing a single source of truth on purchasing operations.

Aligni notifies buyers when vendors update promise dates assuring that your team remains informed and able to respond quickly to reduce impact.

Provide Better Visibility to Others in the Organization

Aligni’s cloud-based, centralized single source of truth is excellent for team collaboration. Engineering can review purchasing and inventory trends to help inform component selection for new projects. The inventory forecast chart depicts incoming purchase inventory at the promise date keeping the production team informed of procurement timelines. Organizations with multiple buyer/planners benefit from Aligni’s built-in collaboration without having to cobble together ad-hoc solutions in cloud spreadsheets or shared email addresses.

Make Past Purchasing and Quote Information Work for You

Aligni stores previous requests, quotes, and purchase orders email correspondence. This archive of historical information is a tool that can help buyers and purchasing managers identify issues in the supply chain and foresee long term trends in pricing and delivery of parts and materials. Going beyond just numbers, Aligni retains copies of email communications and PDF versions of POs for review.

Explore what Aligni can do for your organization

Vendor Benefits from the Aligni Portal

The vendor portal’s benefits don’t stop with the buy side. Vendors benefit from using the portal as well – and without having to invest a lot of time and effort to get there. Vendors access to the portal through an emailed link directly from RFQs and purchases issued from the buyer. No account set up is needed. That means vendors can get on and to work quickly.

Track and Manage Quotes and Purchase Orders

What vendors receive by using the portal is the ability to keep track of new and existing quotes and purchases provided to buyers. These are not only listed but contain status indicators about where in the process the quotes and purchases are. When vendors use the portal, they see what information their customers are seeing and can be ready.

Open purchase orders can be managed within the vendor portal. Vendors have the ability to update delivery information when conditions change. There is also the capability to add comments to the orders if information needs to be delivered to buyers. This could include whether parts may become obsolete, if availability may change in the future or other aspects that may change circumstances now or later on.

React Faster to RFQ Responses

Vendors are notified of new requests for quotes via email and can respond to those requests within the portal. Quotes may be entered into the portal directly or added to a CSV template and uploaded. This reduces response time and data accuracy issues. Learn more about how the vendor portal works for vendors in our documentation site. 

This is just a taste of how Aligni’s vendor portal can help bring more efficiency to your supply chain process. If you’re looking to better manage your purchasing activities while more efficiently communicating with your vendors, it’s time to sign up for Aligni!