Managing Vendors

Vendor management encompasses all the activities an organization undertakes to manage its relationships with external suppliers of goods and services, known as vendors. It is a strategic process aimed at maximizing value, controlling costs, and mitigating risks associated with these relationships.

Before you begin

  • Ensure that you understand your organization's inventory management system and its related procedures before using the Inventory dashboard to upload inventory-related data.
  • Ensure that you have a login provided to you that is assigned a role with administrator privileges. This role is required to access the Inventory dashboard.
  • Review Working with Available-To-Promise (ATP).

Procedure

To manage vendor listing:
  1. Log in to Commerce Lab.
  2. Select Business Tools > Inventory Management > Inventory Dashboard.
    The Inventory Dashboard is displayed.
  3. Select Vendor Management card. The Vendor Management page is displayed.
    Vendor ManagementInstruction
    Add Vendor To create a new vendor entry:
    Select Add Vendor. Following fields are displayed:
    1. Vendor Reference ID
    2. Vendor Name
    3. Contact Phone
    4. Contact Email
    5. Vendor Address
    6. City
    7. State
    8. Country
    9. Zip/ Postal Code

    Select Finish, to create a new vendor. You can view the newly created vendor on vendor management listing page.
    View and Edit vendor details

    Select Vendor Reference ID to view and edit the vendor deatils.

    On the View Vendor page, you can view following vendor details:
    • Basic details
    • Business details
    • Associated item deatils
    Select Edit Vendor Details to edit the vendor. You can edit following details:
    • Vendor name
    • Vendor phone number
    • Contact Email
    • Vendor Address
    • City
    • State
    • Country
    • Zip/ Postal Code
    Note: The toggle button can be used to change the status of a vendor as active or inactive.

    Select Save to save the vendor details.
Batch updates of vendor information
Inventory Managers or Operations Managers responsible for maintaining vendor records and procurement mappings can upload vendor details in a CSV file. You can add new vendors or update existing vendor data using the upload procedure described in Managing Inventory file uploads. The upload consists of two files:
Vendor File
This is a CSV file containing the vendor master data fields described in the Add Vendor list, in the order shown in the list. Two additional fields are available to mark the vendor as active or selected for deletion.
Vendor–item Association File
This CSV file defines a mapping between vendors and items.
For more information, see Uploading Vendor and Vendor-item association files.

Results

Your vendor is created and items associated with the vendor are added.