A New Era in On-boarding – It’s all about managing relationships

Many companies have a complex and sometimes global- mix of trading partners (suppliers, partners and customers) they do business with and often times have large, crossfunctional teams of personnel involved in their onboarding process ranging from IT staff, to Supplier / Customer Relationship Managers, to legal and administrative staff.

This large mix of external partners and internal staff, exchanging administrative and technical connectivity information that’s routinely changing is a challenging, burdensome and inherently slow process, with little or no enterprise visibility into the state of each partner’s onboarding journey. So on-boarding each one and the documents that get exchanged and managing the relationships on an on-going basis can be challenging, especially when relying on a largely manual process. If you look at it from an IT perspective they bear the responsibility to drive the initial on-boarding process.

This could be across multiple applications and processes, having to support a diverse set of communication protocol requirements plus the establishment of passwords, certificates, keys, and contact information, all of which take time and then soon become out-of-date or expire. They also have to ensure that the data they capture and maintain about the business relationship is secure.

From the business’s perspective they have to wait on the on-boarding process to start driving revenue from the relationship. They experience both failures to critical processes when security certificates expire and subsequent delays in resolving the issue due to out-of-date contact information. Worse-case they experience a security breach which exposes all kinds of data including sensitive on-boarding data which damages their reputation and is costly to remediate.

The end result is an impact to a company’s business and a negative reflection on the relationships they have with their B2B community plus redundancy and costs in the work involved.