Selling to any big company takes a lot more than a handshake.
Before any large enterprise does business with a new supplier, they ask for lots of information: business licenses, certificates, client references, proof of insurance—even the company bank balance.
Then the buyer carefully checks everything the seller provides. Teams from accounting to legal may get involved, as well as third parties like the Better Business Bureau or Dun & Bradstreet.
It all takes time. A recent poll of 100 large enterprises showed they routinely take 45 to 60 days to approve a new supplier. After that, they struggle to keep up when any vendor does a move or reorg, merger or acquisition.
The whole process is slow, costly, and fraught with risks and errors. It creates friction and delay between buyers and sellers.
That’s why IBM and Chainyard recently teamed up to modernize the end-to-end process of supplier information management using a blockchain network built with Hyperledger Fabric. Called Trust Your Supplier, the network went live in the fall of 2019.
“Onboarding a new vendor is a painstaking activity,” says Gary Storr, General Manager of Trust Your Supplier. “And with today’s focus on privacy and compliance, it’s gotten even worse.”
“This is a pain point across all companies and all industries,” agrees IBM Blockchain Managing Director David Post, Storr’s partner in the new network.
Vendor approvals rely on point-to-point interactions, so every supplier must apply to every buyer in turn. Every seller must rekey essentially the same data into a new set of forms for every new buyer. But that creates a huge duplication of effort and endless paper shuffling.