Exceed your company targets by using a surprisingly simple but powerful supplier audit management software (SAMS) for your suppliers. With proprietary features you can only find in Lumiform — including faster audits of non-conformances and service level agreements — you can drive efficiency in your team and finish your audits 10x faster without supervision anywhere, anytime, even offline.
Quality and safety management has long been a major concern for many companies. Meeting regulatory demands, however, can be time-consuming and difficult. In order to meet these demands, companies must be able to track the progress of their suppliers through the supply chain, which can be challenging due to a lack of information sharing between parties involved in production processes. Supplier audit management software by Lumiform is designed to streamline this process by providing organizations with greater visibility into supplier processes, allowing them to monitor compliance with regulations more efficiently. Using these systems allows organizations to easily identify areas where improvement is needed within their supply chain, allowing them to make changes before they become problematic rather than dealing with issues after they have caused severe damage.
Many companies are still using paper and manual processes, which is a time-consuming, inefficient, and expensive approach. It's also risky if your team isn't using the most up-to-date technologies in their workflow as they may miss important information that could lead to non-compliance penalties. Companies can use Lumiform’s supplier audit management software to solve this problem and perform audits on their suppliers easily without having to spend too much time or money on them. Reclaim time to focus on other high-priority duties by collecting all of your supplier information in one place so that you can easily find them when needed.
Lumiform’s SAMS keeps you ahead of compliance risks and simplifies your entire supplier audit process by automating much of what you do manually in a snap. Instead of having to check off boxes on paper forms or type up notes from meetings, you can simply upload information from your phone or computer into a digital database and access it anywhere anytime. This lets you complete more audits in less time and automate your workflows every end-to-end audit cycle. Become a trusted authority in your board fast by finally having the spare time to master other duties, like scaling up your business or growing your corporate career. Multiply your bottomline 10x through increased efficiency and improved communication between team members using SAMS.
Grow your company and career faster by only working with trustworthy suppliers. With Lumiform’s SAMS, you can audit, authenticate and filter out your suppliers quickly without learning complicated code or modules.
Work collaboratively on actions while logging operations.
Schedule and assign inspections so that they get conducted reliably in time.
Push notifications, emails or SMS remind your team of inspections that need to be done.
Add text comments and photos during an inspection.
Use logics to guide your team through each inspection in a standardized way.
Customize your reports so they fit your needs exactly.
Trigger and assign actions automatically based on an inspector’s answer.
Involve external partners in action resolution at no extra cost.
Connect Lumiform via API to your existing systems.
Supplier Audit Management Software (SAMS) is an electronic system used to manage supplier audits, review suppliers’ reputations, and certify if they are complying with legislation. It’s the best solution to verify your suppliers’ compliance with quality management, safety, and environmental standards required by law.
SAMS is typically used to rapidly optimize the supplier selection process and improve the quality of your suppliers’ products and services, but it can also be used for other areas as well, such as finance and procurement. That’s because supplier audits are an important part of quality management, and SAMS is necessary to ensure that the customer's products have been produced according to industry standards.
A trusted supplier audit software also helps you become a strategic audit leader and compels your company supplier to deliver high-quality standards that are defensible to regulators. It’s also used to improve customer satisfaction and reduce costs by minimizing errors in production and non-compliance.
Not only that, supplier audit management software helps companies establish executive confidence for their shareholders by:
Harvard Business Review agrees that strong relationships are essential in building business success. With the help of a supplier audit software, you can drive up your company’s overall health in this direction simply by making sure your supplier relationships are legitimate. You can verify contracts, analytics reports, and supplier ratings faster and devoid of errors.
While analog audits can be effective, it is also prone to human errors. This has led many companies to turn to SAMS as an alternative means of conducting supplier audits that allow them to manage these tasks digitally without risking data breaches and loss.
You also need SAMS to keep track of important events that take place during the audit process. For example, if a supplier has been flagged for a supply chain problem, the software can help you stay on top of this issue. This way, you don't miss any deadlines or other important details that could affect how things play out with this particular supplier over time (or whether they continue working with you at all).
You can properly audit a supplier manager by following these guidelines:
Conducting pre-audit research determines what you need to look for and what questions you need to ask. It enables you to develop an audit plan, which will allow you to be more efficient in the actual audit. It's important that this research is conducted before the audit begins because it will give your audit team a better understanding of what they're looking for and how they should approach the audit.
You can find out how well-known and respected your supplier is by reviewing your suppliers’ reputation online. You can do this by searching for the company's name in search engines and on social media sites. Even simply searching for them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ can make a critical difference.
Find out what people have to say about them on social media and review sites like TripAdvisor, or Yelp!. You should also look at product review websites to see if there are any complaints or concerns about the way they operate. Doing so will give you a better understanding of how your suppliers are perceived by their customers and other stakeholders.
Outsourcing affects quality in positive or negative ways. When you audit a supplier manager, you should be looking for signs of outsourcing. You want to know if they've hired outside help in the past or can hire it in the future. You also want to know who they're hiring and what kind of experience they have.
If you find that a supplier outsources their work, it's important to ask why they do so and how much it costs them. This information can help you determine whether or not outsourcing is something your company should consider as well.
Customer reviews are a great way to get a glimpse into how your suppliers are doing, but they're only one part of the big picture. You also need to take customer complaints seriously, even if they seem minor. Customer complaints can indicate deeper issues with your supplier. If a customer complains about something, there's probably more going on than just that one complaint.
An ISO audit is an audit of your organization's compliance with one of the standards set forth by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Using SAMS makes it easy for companies to manage an audit and get better data that is defensible and compliant with ISO regulators. The software makes sure all mandates are met completely at any time in order to make decisions quickly without having to wait around for someone else’s approval first. Here are just some of the major regulatory bodies that SAMS can help your company’s appraiser to comply with:
Internal Organization for Standardization (ISO) is the process of making sure that companies meet with nationwide standards on quality and safety of products and services rendered to the public.
ISO audits come in three forms: first-party, second-party, or third-party audits. And of these audits, these are the major ISO types that are most relevant to supplier audit management software:
Here are the five components you should look for in order to get the best out of your SAMS:
According to Auburn University, there are four types of audits that can be done for suppliers:
The first step in preparing for an audit is understanding what your goals are—and then making sure that everyone in your department or company understands it, too. You'll want to think about what areas you need to focus on, and what parts of your business may need improvement.
Your inspector should be adept with the process of supplier audits so they know what they're looking out for in their key risk indicators (KRIs), key performance indicators (KPIs), and other control processes.
Before auditors arrive, make sure all documentation is easy-to-access and well-labeled to avoid surprises during the visit—and no time spent searching through files or documents.
Take some time after the audit has ended to ask employees or key executives what they learned from the experience. Ask them for suggestions they might have on how things could be improved in future visits by auditors from outside organizations, such as suppliers and regulatory agencies like OSHA.
SAMS will benefit you as a business owner, manager, quality check inspector, or employee in multiple ways. In fact, the supplier audit software benefits you can get will:
Here are some tips and best practices to help you and your inspectors get the most out of supplier audit software:
Know exactly what you and your company is looking for. If you don't know what metrics are important to your business, it's hard to set up a system that will help you achieve those goals. Make sure that you enable full-access to team members in the software so they can help map out the direction with the help of the advantages of the software’s features.
They can also help you in brainstorming for your complete goals, as well as ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to supplier management procedures and requirements.
Use the software to its full potential. Don’t just use it as a way to manage your audits, but also as a way to streamline communication between your company and its suppliers, as well as create a culture of ethics among your teams. On the same note, make sure your data is complete and accurate. If there's something missing from the data, it's not going to be as useful when reviewing it later on.
Keep track of your progress with the software by using reports that provide insights into how well you’re doing. Use the software to assess your supplier audit management practices and how much time you spend doing these activities each day/week/month/year. This will allow you to identify areas where improvement can be made (e.g., if there are too many suppliers on your list who haven't been audited yet).
Alerts can be set up for certain metrics or even certain suppliers, so that if something changes drastically—in either direction—you'll know about it immediately and can take action from there.
Dashboards can help you do this because they give you at-a-glance information about your most important metrics. This way, even if your team is buried deep within a spreadsheet somewhere, they're still available at any time without having to go searching through files. This helps inspectors avoid trying to remember what number might be what thing in which spreadsheet, getting confused, and lagging the process behind.
Make sure the supplier audit software you pick can offer centralized data collection tools for all your suppliers, automate supplier audits with swift solutions, and track your results with dependable metrics.
Fortunately, Lumiform empowers executives to acquire all the features above in its supplier audit management software. In fact, Lumiform’s supplier audit software offers the following proprietary features:
By streamlining compliance tracking and improving decision-making skills of executives, Lumiform’s supplier audit software lets you build better supplier relationships and solve problems faster. As a result, Lumiform lets you collect key vendor information quicker based on past performance and manage approvals faster, scaling your business farther and avoiding adventitious events that derail company targets.
With the help of Lumiform’s API integrations and real-time data analytics, you can reduce overhead costs and avoid costly errors in penalties by automating traditionally manual tasks. Lumiform ensures that your team can execute unified risk monitoring, deliver the highest quality of products and remediate risks consistently.
Lumiform’s supplier audit software empowers your organization with an audit system that consolidates risks related to non-compliance. This system ensures your suppliers always comply with mandates by agencies like OSHA . As a result, you drive efficiency in the quality of your company’s products and boost customer satisfaction, leading to increased sales and an even more profitable return on capital.
With Lumiform’s SAMS, not only can managers detect incidents and near-misses in real-time, but they can also complete corrective and preventive actions (CAPA) faster. This is attributed to Lumiform’s centralized, single location for everyone to have company-wide access to contracts, PRs, and confidential supplier data.
This means a higher ROI through Lumiform’s systematic support for complying with regulations. As an upshot, your company can produce infinite payoffs but still keep your supply chain healthy and full-functioning always.
Lumiform’s supplier audit management software will make certain that your company’s fast growth is foolproof and doesn’t contain hidden risks caused by overefficiency.
Its supplier audit software can help guarantee that your inspection reports, process validation, incident logs, and even supplier surveys are conducted with robust rigor, executive visibility, and seamless integration. That way, the quality solutions you deploy are sustainable, aligned to your macro targets, and not predisposed to blow-ups both at the individual and service levels.
