What is Supplier Diversity?

Supplier Diversity is a corporate strategy to make sure a diverse supplier base in the procurement of services and goods for any organization or entity. The whole concept of Supplier Diversity highlights the creation of an effective diverse supply chain to ensure the inclusion of diverse groups such as veterans, women, etc. in the procurement plans to achieve a more equal share in the market. Supplier diversity programs can be a part of an organizations’ efforts to improve or maintain their moral and ethical standards.

Why is a Supplier Diversity Program Important?

Before anything else, Supplier Diversity Programs enhance economic value as they encourage the growth of diverse businesses in the city/state/nation. Usually, diverse businesses face various hurdles that challenge their startup and sustenance efforts, such as access to enough capital and networking opportunities, which effective supplier diversity programs can reduce these pain points.  Implementing a Supplier Diversity Program benefits struggling businesses and improves the local communities by providing jobs, increased wages, and tax revenue.

What is Diversity Spend?

Diversity Spend Management, otherwise known as Diversity Spend, is the procurement amount that was spent only with small and diverse businesses. While the reason is clear as to why organizations have to implement corporate Supplier Diversity Programs, several entities have historically underperformed on diversity issues with suppliers. Albeit initiating Diversity Programs could be quite challenging and requires working with a business that has in-depth experience, expertise, and capability, they will change your status quo and eventually create a true diversity in supply chain. As a result, your organization could have a more meaningful social and economic influence in your network, and enhance competition and innovation, assure compliance with government terms, and increase both employee and client engagement with your entity.

Gainfront Diversity Software Features:

Data Scrub / Enrichment: 

Get your hands on most accurate database of diverse vendors

Gainfront’s Vendor Data Enrichment services can identify diverse vendors within your current vendor base and deliver you a comprehensive report of your existing utilization. This will offer you a complete visibility into ownership and minority type which let you build your current baseline of diverse vendors. In addition, the report provides you record counts and spend by diversity categories, allowing you to cut down vendor dependency by diversifying your vendor base.

Accurate grouping and categorizing of your vendor base

Correctly grouping and categorizing your vendors is very much required for a proper spend analysis and strategic outsourcing. Our effective Supplier Data Scrubbing service will help you in monitoring all your merger and acquisition activities, ownership, and the changes in diversity status.

Automatically updates your vendors’ information every month

Don’t remember your last enrichment? With our Supplier Diversity Data Enrichment, you no longer have to bother with out-dated certifications. Receive instant updates on all your vendors by downloading the latest data from the Supplier Portal.

Tier 1 Spend Management/Analytics/Reporting:

Get complete visibility of your spend

Get a better visibility of your spends, identify areas of cost saving opportunities, and optimize spend leverage across all your suppliers. With our Tier 1 Spend Analytics Reporting System, you will be able to keep a track of your spends, both direct and indirect spends, by commodity, product, and supplier.

Better visualization of Tier 1 Spend Reporting

With a visualization tool, you can carry out your reporting in a better and efficient way that no longer needs rows of numbers. The data will show the patterns and trends in your entity’s spends. This way, you can be able to identify potential savings in some categories, capture spend leakage, freight savings, and much more.

Gain Leverage

Gather the information you need to negotiate better terms and conditions with your vendors. Having the accurate historical spend data of each and every vendor will provide you leverage for better negotiations, contract renewals, and new vendor contracts.

Tier 2 Spend Management/Analytics/Reporting:

Better data insights with real-time reporting

Gainfront’s Tier 2 Spend Reporting will make it easy for you to track, configure, manage, and report in real-time all your indirect spends categorically. In addition, user-friendly dashboards with effective export features give an additional advantage to leverage the data that can reveal the influence your business is having on the economy.

Eliminate manual errors

Tier 2 Spend Analytics will help you eliminate the manual error that can happen in excel spreadsheet and time-taking vendor follow-up by offering an easy-to-use web-based portal to track vendors’ Tier 2 spend. Your vendors will find it effortless to manage their compliance, report spend, remove/add/track their Tier 2 suppliers.

Get Accurate Spend Reporting

Gainfront’s Tier 2 Supplier Diversity Spend is capable of managing the entire process by identifying global qualified vendors, collecting certifications, tracking expirations, sending timely automated email alerts, and reminders.

International Supplier Registration

Certification is an imperative validation process that assures and provides formal acknowledgment that a business is owned, managed, and run by the diverse applicant(s).  This process includes an application and document review, on-site interview, and confirmation. Certified businesses are welcomed to register themselves in the Diverse Supplier Portal/International Diverse Supplier Portal.

Government Solutions

The U.S. federal government has mandated that a contractor whose contract is likely to exceed $700,000 ($1.5 million for construction) must set and meet the pre-set government goals regarding diversity spend. However, if you don’t have mandated goals to adhere to, you may want to be held liable for the diversity of your supplier spend. To hold yourself responsible for this goal, you have to be able to pull proper data and reporting to submit the annual report to the government. Gainfront’s Supplier Diversity Program Management will help you track the most comprehensive metrics that customers need to report their spend on small businesses.

Economic Impact Analysis

It can be a challenging task to know how you are helping your local communities with your diversity spend, which is why Gainfront’s Supplier Diversity Program Management will assist you to visualize the impact using Economic Impact Analysis reports. Using an Input-Output Model, we can see the impact by state, region, business unit, etc. Using this feature, customers will be able to see the true impact their diversity dollars have at the local level.

Gainfront Supplier Database (QLeads):

Unless you’re starting completely from scratch you probably already know a few suppliers, however, it’s always worthwhile looking around to see if they are any other suppliers that can offer a better price and a better range. Using Gainfront supplier database, we enrich our customers’ suppliers’ pool by introducing them to new diverse suppliers who can meet the quality standards and needs of the specific skill of our customers, whether it is woman-owned or veteran-owned.

Industry Commission Report

Gainfront will send customized reports to the industry commission on an annual basis. For instance, the customer is from the utility industry with a customer base of 3 million including residential, industrial, and commercial customers. They provided natural gas to some parts of Las Vegas. Now, Gainfront, involving various aspects, will develop a reporting solution for the client and submit it to the California Public Utilities Commission as utility companies operating in the West and South West of the USA and serving any region of California are regulated by CPUC.

Supplier Certification Management/Renewal

Gainfront’s Supplier Diversity program Management will keep a track of all suppliers’ certifications, sending them automated alerts and reminders about the expiration and certification renewal to the supplier. Our easy-to-use and intuitive Supplier Certification Management/Renewal feature will provide the guidance and supporting resources to accelerate the process and maintain your certified business.

Certification Assistance for Suppliers

For diverse suppliers, certification is the key to getting started on the organization’s supplier diversity portal. 90% of supplier diversity programs contract only with certified businesses, so not having a certification could imply that you are missing out on opportunities. Whether it is veteran-owned, minority-owned, or women-owned, Gainfront Diversity will help suppliers get their certification in a simplified way.

Customer/Constituent/Agency Reporting

The report will assist in tracking individual diverse vendor payments that were made during certain time duration along with the certifying agency name which certified the vendor. It offers compliance to get the listing of all vendors certified by a specific agency as well.

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