Test Your Vendor Onboarding Knowledge
How’s your knowledge of supplier onboarding best practices? Here is a question from VIMCOE’s new Accredited Vendor Information Professional Certification (AVIP) program:
Upon notification of a new vendor, which of the following is the first step the vendor information management professional should take?
A) Gather information about the vendor.
B) Validate the vendor’s bank account information.
C) Check the vendor against the FBI’s most wanted list.
D) Search the vendor master file to see if the vendor is already there.
The correct answer is D – Search the vendor file to see if the vendor is already there. Often a “new” vendor may only be new to a particular buyer and is already in your system. So the first step is to check your vendor master file for the vendor. You want to avoid making a duplicate entry and if the vendor already exists in the database, then you do not need to do the other steps, which is why you want to do this first.