Think back to March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic started dramatically impacting supply chains around the world. There was an almost immediate shortage of various medical supplies, personal protective equipment like disposable masks and gloves, and, in North America, toilet paper.
What were procurement teams to do? They needed supplies for their businesses, but their usual suppliers were out of stock with no idea when their products would be available again. But unusually long shipping times meant massive delays between sourcing and receiving goods.
Procurement teams went to their supplier master lists to try to track down more potential suppliers. In doing so, many hit a wall because they didn’t have a strong foundation of reliable, complete supplier data. They were missing critical attributes, such as NAICS codes and supplier descriptions, and faced duplicate suppliers, expired diversity certificates, and more.
Before they could even start looking at alternative suppliers they had to fix their existing supplier data or start sourcing from scratch.
Why Identifying Gaps Before Supplier Data Enrichment Is Crucial
Supplier data enrichment is an essential process that strengthens and broadens the information on suppliers, allowing businesses to make better, more informed decisions. However, the first step to effective data enrichment is understanding and identifying gaps in the data.
Identifying Gaps for Targeted Enrichment
The data in a typical supplier master file often contains inaccuracies, redundancies, or missing information. Identifying these gaps in advance helps organizations avoid layering more data onto an already-flawed foundation. Here’s why this approach matters:
Prioritizes Critical Data Needs: By assessing gaps, organizations can identify which data fields are missing or inaccurate and prioritize those that are essential to supplier relationship management. For example, critical fields such as supplier contact information, certifications, or diversity credentials can be highlighted as priority areas for enrichment.
Reduces Redundancy and Improves Data Quality: Prioritizing supplier data enrichment begins with understanding the current state of your data. Without this foundational step, you risk creating duplicate entries, which can cloud visibility into supplier relationships. By identifying gaps upfront, you enable a thorough clean-up and consolidation process that lays the groundwork for effective enrichment. Incorporating specific attributes, such as NAICS codes and goods/services classifications, further enhances data quality by providing a standardized view of supplier capabilities. This approach not only improves accuracy but also results in a streamlined, comprehensive master data set that supports clear, actionable insights for your procurement team.
Aligns Data with Business Objectives: Each organization has unique requirements for supplier data based on its industry and goals. Identifying gaps early on helps ensure that the enrichment process aligns with business-specific needs. Proper supplier master data management solutions allow companies to adjust their enrichment process based on these identified gaps, resulting in more useful data that supports strategic decision-making.
Streamlines and Optimizes Data Enrichment Investments: Supplier data enrichment can be costly, especially if applied broadly without focus. To maximize ROI, companies should start by assessing their current data quality to identify specific gaps in accuracy and completeness. By pinpointing these areas, organizations can target enrichment efforts where they are most impactful. For example, focusing on attributes like supplier diversity certifications can directly support compliance and ESG goals, while NAICS codes or goods/services classifications provide valuable insights for supplier segmentation and spend analysis.
Ensures Compliance and Risk Mitigation: Without identifying data gaps, companies may overlook suppliers who lack necessary certifications or compliance requirements, increasing operational risk. Filling these specific gaps proactively enables more robust risk mitigation and regulatory compliance.
Facilitates Smarter Procurement Decisions: For procurement teams, access to comprehensive, accurate supplier data enables better strategic sourcing and contract management. Identifying gaps, like missing attributes or spelling errors, before enrichment ensures that procurement teams are not misled by outdated or incomplete information, allowing for smarter, faster decisions.
This approach not only saves costs but also sets your organization up for success in the next step, which is supplier data enrichment.
Build a Strong Data Foundation Using Autonomous Data Enrichment
Building a strong data foundation with autonomous data enrichment includes:
- Consolidating multiple vendor masters.
- Selecting and leveraging the right data enrichment vendor
- Expanding parameters for more complete data
- Automatically updating data fields to ensure accuracy
- Create a single consolidated and standardized vendor master
Supplier information changes often and manually keeping track of this information is nearly impossible, which is why innovative, autonomously enriched solutions are the future of vendor master data management.
From Data Enrichment to Emergency Sourcing
When you have a complete vendor master and accurate data to reflect your relationship with each supplier, it becomes that much easier to locate similar suppliers or expand your relationship with a current supplier in the face of an emergency. While it’s doubtful that we’ll experience another supply chain disruption as widespread as we did during the COVID-19 pandemic in our lifetime, this global crisis demonstrated the importance of enriched supplier data to every business in the world. Preparing for the next disruption is on every procurement professional’s mind and putting in place a supplier data enrichment plan is a good place to start.
Stephany Lapierre is the Founder and CEO of Tealbook. A lifelong entrepreneur, Stephany spent 10 years building a successful strategic sourcing and procurement consulting firm and it sparked her desire to solve the supplier data problem. Stephany is passionate about establishing the gold standard for supplier data and making it accessible to every large organization, which is why TealBook’s Supplier Data Platform automates the collection, verification, and enrichment of supplier data across any data lake or enterprise system. TealBook is a leader in procurement technology and has been chosen by Spend Matters as one of their "50 Vendors to Know," named a top 100 solution by ProcureTech, and recognized as a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner. A highly-coveted supply chain thought leader, Stephany has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Women in Supply Chain. Outside of work, you can find Stephany spending time with her husband and three daughters, and keeping active on the ski hill or in a pilates studio.
