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If your company has several active suppliers, you probably experience the reality of having fragmented information across departments. Procurement might have an Excel spreadsheet with a list of suppliers. It's fairly up-to-date. But it doesn't include the contracts. A lawyer has the contracts filed in a folder. But they don't have the price changes that were negotiated later. The logistics team has email communications about deliveries and changes. Finance has payment data in SAP. Nobody has the complete picture, and lacking data governance leads to risks.
The true cost of manual and non-integrated "supplier management"
If, when you need to answer "what was the last change we made with this supplier?", the answer involves a marathon search, or when an auditor asks "where are the terms of this contract?", someone has to manually look for it, the cost of this manual work and scattered information isn't always visible.
Let's see where the cost lies in not having centralized and digitized Document Management:
- Time spent by Procurement searching for information.
- Errors when working with incomplete information.
- Risk of non-compliance with terms due to lack of knowledge.
- Lost negotiation power.
- Redundancy: the same information stored in 5 different places.
What happens when everything is in one place
OpenText Core Content Management does something that sounds simple, but in practice is profoundly transformative for how companies work. With this solution, each supplier has a "site" where all their information resides, which we call "Workspaces". It is a workspace fully dedicated to that supplier. When a supplier is registered in SAP, the system automatically creates this space. And from that moment on, everything related to that supplier, whether contracts, communications, price changes, compliance documentation, is all there. This means the contract and potential changes, communications about bank account changes, quality and regulatory compliance certificates, audit history – everything is there. All accessible with a click, in less than a minute, in one interface. This is possible because Core Content creates a history of changes, user accesses, etc., meaning there is full traceability of files.
Furthermore, everything stored makes sense; it's not just a repository. Permissions and a version history are created for as long as needed.
A practical example of an OpenText CCM Workspace
Imagine a company's CFO looking for information about a supplier who left without prior notice, after 12 years of close collaboration.
If they had implemented Core Content Management, the process would have been:
1. Opens the Workspace of the (departed) supplier
2. The original contract from 12 years ago is there
3. All subsequent changes are documented in chronological order
4. Special terms are cataloged
5. Volume discounts are recorded
6. There's a record of who negotiated what and when
How long does that take? 2 minutes.
Afterwards, when they need to find a new supplier with similar characteristics, they know exactly what terms to negotiate. Because everything is documented.
“Centralized documents” matter more than we sometimes think
A company might have all its supplier documentation stored somewhere. But what Core Content Management does is different, because it stores the information, connects it, catalogs it, retrieves it when needed, and links it to SAP.
For example:
- When Finance processes a supplier invoice in SAP, they can directly access the payment terms because they are in the same Workspace.
- When legal needs to check if a supplier has liability insurance, they look it up in the Workspace.
- When internal audit asks if we comply with quality terms, it's documented in the Workspace.
An OpenText Workspace is different because it records:
- Who can see what. If someone is from finance, they see financial data. If they are from quality, they see compliance documentation. Not everyone sees everything.
- What information is important. Metadata allows you to search for "give me all electronics suppliers in the southern region". It's not text search. It's intelligent search.
- User access, changes, and who made them. If someone modifies a price or a term, it is recorded.
- Relevant dates or deadlines. If a supplier has a certification expiring in 6 months, the system can automatically notify the responsible party.
Another benefit that deserves special attention is that when the Procurement team changes, for example, the handover is infinitely easier. The new person in charge can understand what happened with the supplier over 5 years in an afternoon.
That's what a Workspace does. It transforms "supplier documentation" from "a bunch of folders in different places" to "a single place where I know I'll find what I need".
If this sounds familiar... at Brait, we help you implement smart Document Management
If in your company: there are several active suppliers and sometimes it's unclear where all the documentation is; a lot of time is wasted searching for information that should be easily accessible; negotiated terms or special conditions need to be reconstructed; there have been setbacks because someone who left was the only one who knew certain supplier details; audits take longer than they should because documentation isn't organized.
Then smart document management can be the solution. At Brait, we help dozens of companies implement it and have seen how chaos can simply transform into intelligent centralization. The benefit is not only in numbers (less time searching, fewer errors), but also in confidence and more fluid, productive ways of working.
If you want to understand how your company could benefit from this, contact us.
