Introducing the Retail Vendor Portal Template
The IBM Retail Vendor Portal Template for WebSphere Portal can help retailers accelerate the development of an online presence to strengthen relationships with existing suppliers, as well as bring new vendors on-board more quickly and cost effectively. It includes a sample vendor portal website which has been built on top of WebSphere Portal, Lotus Forms, Lotus Web Content Management, and Lotus Sametime.
The template provides best practice examples for the many design patterns which are common in this type of portal. All content, layouts, forms and portlets can be customized and configured to meet specific requirements. The template assets can be integrated with existing systems and content to provide an exceptional user experience for retailers and their vendors/suppliers.
Why a Retail Vendor Portal?
The Supply Chain area has seen many innovations and the competitive environment continues to demand new, innovative approaches. Retailers will work to extract more value from their supply chains that will help them respond more quickly to customer, supplier, and regulatory influences. One core requirement is the ability to respond quickly to changes in the market by adding new vendors and product assortments, as well as build a stronger partnership with suppliers. Today’s on-boarding process for new vendors are inefficient, difficult and costly due to high administrative overhead, information required in the process residing in many different systems.
Today’s smart retailers are leveraging supplier portals as a way to save cost and increase productivity and profitability.
Benefits
- Decrease cycle time for on-boarding new vendors with electronic forms
- More effective collaborative partnerships with suppliers and partners through:
- Better user experience
- Stronger communication & collaboration
- More pro-active supply chains
- Save cost and increase productivity and profitability:
- Enable self-service for vendors with access to personalized content
- Streamline content delivery by putting it in the hands of subject matter experts
- Allow Vendors the ability to manage the users within their organization through the Vendor Maintenance Portlet