With globalization on the rise, almost all markets have seen fundamental changes in the last decades. Suppliers are being increasingly involved in the production process, so the right choice of suppliers has become a crucial aspect for businesses to consider.

Solvency rating and monitoring – which has long been a common practice in the area of customer management – is now becoming an important aspect in vendor management, too. One of the reasons is that the financial failure of suppliers can result in considerable losses, e.g. due to increased long-run production costs or disruptions of production.

This is why more and more companies are implementing rating procedures to assess and monitor suppliers, both when engaging new suppliers and for existing suppliers.

What companies expect of a modern supplier rating:

• Automatic rating of different types of suppliers (e.g. potential, standard, bottleneck, core, strategic supplier)
• Integration of internal and external supplier information
• Risk identification and control
• Flexible reporting in supplier rating

The SAP software solutions SI (Supplier Information) and SR (Supplier Rating) provided by SOPLEX enable you to:

• Connect to business information agencies directly from within SAP
• Rate suppliers automatically according to fully customizable criteria (e.g. master data, performance, external information) and to determine ratios
• Determine ratios for different supplier types (e.g. potential, approved, advanced or preferred supplier)
• Take into account hard criteria (e.g. product quality, financial power, certifications, …) and soft criteria (e.g. availability, services, flexibility, …)
• Automatically update the ratios on a continuous basis due to possible changes
• Classify the suppliers on the basis of the ratios obtained
• Identify risks ahead of time
• Control follow-up processes in SAP