If we aim for optimal supply chain management, we must ensure that every link in the chain is well maintained — and one of the most critical players is our suppliers.
Efficiently managing supplier relationships in SAP remains a challenge for many organizations. Issues such as manual processes, disorganized master data, and lack of traceability impact agility, collaboration, and decision-making. The following sections explore the main challenges and the solutions that help optimize supplier management within the SAP environment.
Challenges and Solutions in Supplier Relationship Management within an SAP System
Challenges in Supplier Invitations and Offer Evaluations
One of the main hurdles in supplier relationship management in SAP lies in the bidding processes, which often lack agility in meeting today’s market demands. When initiating a request process — whether RFI, RFQ, or RFP — a significant amount of time is lost due to the continued reliance on manual management, using inefficient tools such as emails, spreadsheets for offer comparison, or phone calls for follow-ups.
This not only causes delays but also increases the risk of lost key information and wrong decisions about the best offer.
The Lack of Centralization Hampers Collaboration
Without a unified communication channel, supplier collaboration suffers. Information becomes fragmented, documentation becomes hard to manage, and traceability is lost. Moreover, offer submissions are frequently unstructured, leading to:
- inefficiencies during preselection,
- risk of excluding qualified suppliers,
- inclusion of unsuitable candidates,
- loss of transparency throughout the process.
How to Tackle These Challenges
The first essential step is to implement a standardized supplier evaluation and classification process. This ensures that everyone applies the same assessment criteria, which significantly streamlines the bidding workflow.
Secondly, it’s crucial to centralize and automate the offer management process. Today, there are multiple solutions integrated with SAP that elevate this process. One notable example is SIGO, developed by Innova, which enables users to:
- launch bidding processes in just a few clicks,
- centralize all relevant data in a single repository,
- offer suppliers a structured channel to submit their proposals.
In addition, it includes intelligent offer comparison features, transforming the process into something far more agile and transparent.
The result is a more efficient procurement cycle, with complete traceability and substantial improvements in supplier relationship management in SAP — both from the buyer’s perspective and the supplier’s, who benefits from a clearer, faster, and more streamlined experience.
Challenges in Supplier Master Data Creation and Maintenance
Although often overlooked, data has a direct impact on supplier relationship management in SAP—especially when it comes to master data, which underpins critical processes such as procurement, payments, and evaluations.
There is one fundamental principle we must always keep in mind: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). If we feed our ERP with inaccurate data, the resulting processes and reports will also be flawed. Although this seems obvious, many companies continue to make recurring mistakes in the creation and maintenance of supplier master data.
Where Do These Errors Originate?
One of the most critical stages is the onboarding of new suppliers. Even today, many organizations handle this process using Excel forms, attached documents, or other disconnected channels. A SAP user must then manually transcribe that information into the system, which not only consumes time but also introduces:
- data entry errors,
- duplicate records,
- a complete loss of traceability.
Anyone working with suppliers in SAP has likely encountered vendor data with errors. This issue not only degrades data quality but also damages supplier relationships and introduces risks such as:
- withholding tax errors,
- delays or errors in payments,
- high post-processing cleanup costs.
Moreover, the fragmented nature of the process and the lack of clear approval workflows mean that traceability is virtually nonexistent.
How to Solve These Issues
To address this situation, it is essential to involve the supplier (first interested) in the entry data process implement a data governance strategy that defines clear roles: who approves, who verifies, and who manages the information for each supplier type. This structure should also include:
- additional validations,
- documented logs of all changes (crucial for future audits),
- and, whenever possible, automation of the supplier master data lifecycle.
However, before automating, we must tackle the root of the problem. It is vital to define clear standardization criteria, specifying, for example: the list of documents that vendors must attach, the mandatory fields, and any non-standard SAP information relevant to your business.
This prevents common issues such as two users registering the same supplier with slight variations, which later result in duplicates.
In this context, well defined workflows allow all these validations to be performed centralized and embedded business rules to be enforced. For this, specialized tools like SiDM Vendors are required, as this capability is not included in the core SAP system.
Migration to SAP S/4HANA as a Strategic Opportunity
If you are currently migrating to SAP S/4HANA, this is the perfect moment for your technology partner to perform duplicate data cleansing using these types of tools before moving the data.
This represents a key opportunity to enhance data quality by eliminating obsolete records, blocking duplicates, and ensuring the system is fed with consistent information from the start.
Challenges in Managing Communication and Business Relationships with Suppliers
As previously outlined, one of the key factors impacting supplier relationship management in SAP is the use of disorganized communication channels. This becomes particularly critical in processes involving requirement clarifications, shipping notifications, payment inquiries, or incident reporting, resulting in delays such as time-consuming invoice searches and the loss of valuable information.
Another common challenge is the lack of visibility and traceability across the entire order-to-payment cycle. For instance, if a supplier wants to confirm receipt of a PO or inquire about an invoice status, they typically reach out via email or phone. This generates uncertainty, dissatisfaction, and an unnecessary operational burden on internal teams, who must dedicate time and resources to handling these repetitive and inefficient interactions.
A particularly problematic process is the confirmation and registration of invoices, which are still often received as PDF attachments via email—or in some cases, even on paper—contradicting any initiative aimed at full digitalization.
Solution: Centralization and Self-Service Through Integrated Portals
To enhance communication and supplier relationship management in SAP, many organizations are turning to SAP-integrated supplier portals. These platforms provide a structured, single communication channel, addressing the challenges mentioned and offering suppliers a self-service environment where they can:
- view purchase orders,
- check registered invoices,
- download tax documents,
- and pre-register invoices directly on the platform.
This setup allows the accounts payable team to simply validate or reject the invoice, reducing manual errors, accelerating processing, and improving transparency. In parallel, there are SAP-compatible modules that enable automated order tracking, offering all the necessary information to establish full commercial traceability. Centralized access to information on orders, deliveries, and invoices also facilitates the generation of analytical reports used to evaluate supplier performance based on KPIs such as:
- delivery punctuality,
- response times,
- quotation compliance, among others.
What Digital Solutions Can Help Enhance Supplier Relationship Management in SAP?
At Innova, we specialize in delivering solutions that optimize supplier management from request through to follow-up—ensuring traceability, data quality, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance at every stage of the process, thereby strengthening supplier relationship management in SAP. Our standout solutions include:
- SIGO, which digitizes the bidding and quotation process, centralizes all proposals in one unique App and enables an objective and transparent supplier evaluation. It ensures full traceability, significantly reduces processing time, and helps improve procurement in SAP by promoting more agile, structured processes aligned with best practices.
- SiDM Vendors, a comprehensive solution for onboarding and maintaining supplier master data. It applies embedded business rules, engage vendors in data creation, and multi-stage approval workflows, improving data quality from the outset, avoiding duplicate records, and facilitating audits and compliance—especially useful during SAP S/4HANA migrations.
- SIPRO, our self-service supplier portal fully integrated with SAP, where suppliers can check purchase orders, we can deploy customized PO Acknowledge processes, verify invoice statuses, download tax documentation, register invoices, and engage in chat-based communication linked to each order. This improves transparency and reduces the operational burden on internal teams.
- SITRACK, which provides detailed oversight of the procurement cycle by centralizing requests and orders, managing responsible parties, generating automatic alerts, and offering analytics tools to evaluate supplier performance, identify bottlenecks, and support data-driven decisions. Its integration with SIGO and SIPRO ensures a seamless experience and full process coverage and PO-focused communication with each vendor.
