I want to preface this article with the disclaimer that I am not a quality engineer, and have never been on a quality team. My background is CRM management for machine shops. It was my job to identify weak points in our operational processes and improve them using CRM technology, and that's exactly what I did with how my machine shop onboarded and managed suppliers.
After pitching the idea to use CRM to capture new and maintain existing supplier information, my machine shop made the decision to use HubSpot as the primary tool and single source of truth for supplier management for several reasons.
First, because the team’s email addresses synced with HubSpot, the suppliers we worked with and our team’s emails with their staff were automatically added to our CRM. So a database of our suppliers (companies), our key supplier contacts, and conversations already existed. And a detailed, current database is the bedrock for powerful automations and workflows.
Second, a significant amount of the supplier management activities were exceptionally manual, recurring tasks that were prone to human error, and took up an unnecessary amount of our quality team’s time. We saw an opportunity to automate several activities with HubSpot; and as we officially moved supplier management into the CRM, even more automation opportunities presented themselves.
Third, because multiple team members were involved with supplier management (quality, purchasing, estimation, etc.), there wasn’t a standardized process or agreed upon system. Companies, records, and documents were scattered across different systems like SharePoint sites, ERPs, OneDrive, or sequestered in individual accounts rather than one central database that everyone had access to and was being updated daily.
Building custom properties was the first thing I did to create a supplier management ecosystem in HubSpot. The companies that we categorize as “suppliers” used standard properties like email domain, billing address, and company size, but we needed our CRM to hold information that was totally unique to vendors.
I derived our supplier properties from the shop’s supplier onboarding survey. Not only would these populate our new HubSpot-based supplier onboarding survey (covered in the next section), they would also be used in the AVL and tables that organized and segmented supplier data for our quality team.
If you decide to use HubSpot (or similar CRM technology) to build a supplier database, you’ll want to create your own supplier properties based on your team’s unique supplier survey (if you have one already), but I’ll give you a few examples of the properties I built.
|
Property Name |
Property Type |
|
AS9100D Expiration Date |
Date picker |
|
Calibration Documentation |
Drop-down select |
|
Capacity |
Multi-line text |
|
FDA # |
Single-line text |
|
NDA |
File |
|
Site Audit |
Single checkbox |
The number of custom properties you build is dependent on the current state of your team’s QMS and manufacturing capabilities.
For example, I initially built 140 custom properties dedicated to the “Supplier” record in our HubSpot account. Had the shop achieved compliance with additional standards or grew its supplier base to support a broader range of work, I would have created more properties to capture the appropriate information.
In the next section, we’ll go through how I built HubSpot to drive the supplier onboarding process, made possible by these newly created custom supplier properties that could be embedded in a dynamic, online onboarding form.
Prior to moving supplier management into HubSpot, the supplier onboarding process was a painfully manual one.
Prospective suppliers either filled out a printed survey (which had to be scanned and emailed back to our quality team) or a digital PDF version, and then a Quality Engineer had to manually enter that information into an Excel spreadsheet that was temperamental and prone to “breaking.”
The HubSpot Forms tool was an ideal medium to deliver the supplier onboarding survey for two reasons:
Our supplier onboarding survey captured critical contact, business, staffing, and operational information, as well as the specific certifications (e.g., ISO 9001, NADCAP), regulations (EU RoHS, FDA), and details about the vendor’s own QMS. All of this information populated their company, or vendor, record in HubSpot, and determined if they could be added to our AVL.
All of this information can easily be captured in an online form, and it’s much quicker for a supplier to fill out in this format. Using an online form that automatically populates a database also eliminates the risk of human error that comes with manually inputting data.
Plus, I built some nifty conditional logic into the form that either shortened or lengthened the form based on what the supplier answered. This ensured we captured all necessary information without the supplier needing to fill out any redundant paperwork.
Once a supplier contact clicked the “submit” button at the end of the online survey, their answers were automatically added to the supplier database. A workflow was triggered that:
This combination of supplier properties, a dynamic, web-based form, and automated workflows created a seamless onboarding experience for both the new supplier and our quality team.
The information we captured through the HubSpot form was also used further downstream in the supplier management journey, primarily for maintaining a database of our supplier’s quality documentation and certifications (required by both our shop’s QMS and our OEM customers).
If you've made it to the end here(thanks, by the way), let's wrap up by talking about why HubSpot is ideal for supplier management. Why not dedicated supplier management software, or a different CRM entirely? Why HubSpot.
Using HubSpot CRM technology to manage a shop's supplier database is a win for several reasons, and it really boils down to budget and customization.
Shops can't spend a lot on software. They need to prioritize their budget on staffing, training, and CapEx equipment. The leaner your software stack can be, the better. If I could only pick 3 software subscriptions to support my machine shop, I'd go with a CRM, an ERP, and a shop floor management tool (and I'd aim to integrate all 3).
And if you can only have a CRM or supplier management software subscription, get the CRM. If you pick the right one, it's far more adaptable and can handle the supplier management activities if customized correctly.
Related Read: Choosing the Right CRM for your Manufacturing Business
Hopefully this is helpful! Feel free to drop us a line if you have questions about HubSpot. We love chatting with shops about CRM technology.