Vendor Portal Development
A vendor portal is a web platform owned by a buyer that aggregates functionality for vendor management and bidding. Since 2005, ScienceSoft provides vendor portal development services from portal consulting to development and integration with your or your vendors’ software and third-party apps.
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Vendor Portal Types
B2B vendor portal for manufacturers
Allows more efficient and accelerated supply chain management.
B2B vendor portal for non-manufacturers
E.g., banks, education institutions, government institutions.
Leads to increased healthy competition among the company’s vendors, objective assessment of a current market offer and smarter procurement decisions.
B2B vendor portal for GPO
Provides a great opportunity for small and mid-sized companies to enjoy the reduced prices and other benefits of group purchasing.
How Do You Know You Need a Vendor Portal
Vendor portal development optimizes supply chain operations, providing unparalleled visibility, accelerating procurement, and mitigating risks, delays, and supplier loss. Other benefits you can expect from your new solution:
Better purchasing conditions
You enjoy better prices, smarter delivery and lower risks with comprehensive information of your broader supplier base.
Enhanced local purchase
Local small and medium-sized companies become visible and easier to reach.
Lower cost of purchasing
A B2B portal eliminates slow paperwork and email-based collaboration, bringing all the communication in one place and allowing to reduce inventory costs.
Improved R&D process
B2B portal becomes your new open working environment, that allows newfound process transparency and strengthened connection with your vendors to leverage their valuable experience in the company’s R&D process.
Key Functionality ScienceSoft Delivers
Consolidated vendor database
Get quick insights with all vendor information and interaction history brought in one place and wisely structured.
Powerful search options
Easily navigate through huge bodies of data on your suppliers and their products/services.
Order management
Track the status of your invoice/order, define repeated/group/scheduled orders.
Research&Analysis
Track the market trends and find the best opportunities in a few clicks.
Rating system
Make more considered decisions evaluating earlier performance of your vendors.
Vendor onboarding and management
Simplify registration, profile management, and document submission processes.
Payment and invoicing
Securely process payments, generate and track invoices and financial reporting.
Our Web Portal Portfolio
ScienceSoft USA Corporation Is a 3-Year Champion in the Financial Times Rating
Three years in a row (2022–2024), the Financial Times has included ScienceSoft USA Corporation in the list of 500 fastest-growing American companies. This is the result of our dedication to driving project success despite any constraints and disruptions.
Cooperation Models We Offer
Vendor portal development from scratch
We cover end-to-end development of supplier portals:
- Elicit vendor portal requirements.
- Write a requirements specification.
- Create UX/UI design.
- Develop and test your new vendor portal software.
- Integrate with your or your vendors’ software and third-party tools.
- Conduct IT staff and end-user training.
Platform-based vendor portal development
Our platform-based vendor portal development service includes:
- Platform choice (Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SharePoint).
- Platform-based vendor portal planning and design.
- Platform-based vendor portal development and customization.
- Platform-based vendor portal integration with custom/third-party tools.
- Vendor portal migration between platforms or to the latest platform version.
Vendor portal development based on ready specifications
Our web developers build supplier portal software rigidly following the provided specifications about intended functionality.
Legacy vendor portal modernization
We enhance the performance of your existing solution, ensure its smooth integration with elements and safe data migration.
After the portal is launched, our team will continue maintaining and supporting the B2B portal software to ensure its high relevance in the future.
From what we've seen, off-the-shelf vendor portal tools seldom meet the comprehensive needs of mid-sized and large businesses. They often fall short in functionality and can get quite pricey as you add more users. At ScienceSoft, we've noticed a trend where our clients are leaning toward custom solutions. Tailor-made portals can handle all the unique and complex vendor management stuff, even specific procurement rules. Plus, they fit like a glove with the company's existing tech stack, like those of ERP, inventory management, and procurement software, and tick all the boxes for compliance and security.
Challenges We Solve
Troublesome ERP integration
The integration of the portal with ERP system is often long, complicated and painful process. But if you want to get truly automated business processes, reduce a great volume of routine manual actions and track relevant info on the business needs, a deep ERP integration is essential for your B2B Vendor portal, thus we ensure seamless integration with this internal system for you to get the most of the new solution.
Big and slow solution
As vendors differ in size, offering and collaboration model, to avoid unnecessary complexity, we keep what suits exactly for your business. Moreover, we can introduce various vendor account options, e.g. you can provide limited functionality for your minor vendors or integrate with the internal systems of your key suppliers.
Buyer-vendor communication failure
As any communication gap may cause massive loses (imagine a delivery delay notification being lost), we ensure that you’re kept up-to-date and nothing is left unnoticed with automated alerts, notification and live charts.
Tailored Vendor Portal Development Process
1.
Planning and analysis
During this initial phase, the team defines the objectives, scope, and desired functionalities of the vendor portal. This includes gathering stakeholders’ requirements, identifying the target user base, analyzing competitors (if needed), and more. The process yields a detailed and prioritized list of features essential for the portal. High-priority features often include vendor onboarding and management, order management, payment and invoicing. Additionally, this phase determines the architecture and tech stack of the future portal.
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2.
UX and UI design
This stage is dedicated to designing user interfaces that are clear, intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, and aligned with the brand's visual identity. The design process involves:
- Planning dashboards, e.g., those that provide vendors with an at-a-glance view of their most critical metrics, including order statuses, pending actions, and recent activity.
- Creating detailed wireframes that outline the user journey for key processes such as onboarding, order management, and invoicing.
- Combining the wireframes into a prototype of the vendor portal and running prototype testing.
- Creating a complete UI kit (if not available yet) with color palettes, fonts, widgets, and other visual elements to reflect the brand’s identity.
- Transforming the prototypes into full-color UI mockups.
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3.
Iterative development, testing, and deployment
The team establishes and configures development, staging, and production environments. Then, developers create front-end and back-end parts, APIs and integrations with other systems (like ERP, CRM, SCM, procurement software). Key considerations during this phase include:
- Security aspects, including implementing robust user authentication and access control mechanisms to safeguard sensitive information of vendors and your business.
- Performance optimization via load balancing and database optimization techniques to ensure the portal can handle high volumes of transactions and data without lag.
- Compliance with relevant international standards and regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.), including via incorporating features like automated audit trails and reporting.
In parallel with development iterations, QA engineers conduct various types of testing like functional, integration, compatibility, performance, and security testing to identify and hand over to developers all issues or bugs for fixing.
Upon successful completion of testing phases (all errors were fixed and retested) and user acceptance testing, the portal is deployed to a live environment for real-world use. After each major release (e.g., either the initial portal or updates deployment), the team gathers feedback from the users on the functionality, usability, and any issues they face.
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4.
Ongoing maintenance and updates
The team provides in-depth user guides, video tutorials, and FAQs to assist vendors and your employees in navigating the portal efficiently. A dedicated support channel might also be established to help vendors with onboarding, integration, and troubleshooting.
Also, when the vendor portal is running in the production environment, ongoing maintenance is required to ensure the portal operates smoothly and remains relevant. This includes monitoring, troubleshooting any issues that arise, regular updates, security patches, and adding new features based on user feedback.
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Sample Costs of Vendor Portal Development Projects
The cost of developing a vendor portal typically ranges from $40,000 to $300,000. This cost is influenced by the functionality needed to meet your business requirements, by whether you opt for a platform-based solution or a custom-built approach, by the geographical location of the development team, by the technology stack used, as well as by the number of systems your portal needs to integrate with.
How Long Does It Take to Develop a Vendor Portal
| Level of complexity | Approximate timelines |
|---|---|
|
Level of complexity
Vendor portal prototype |
Approximate timelines
2–8 weeks |
|
Level of complexity
Basic vendor portal |
Approximate timelines
3–4 months |
|
Level of complexity
Vendor portals of medium complexity |
Approximate timelines
5–8 months |
|
Level of complexity
Advanced vendor portal |
Approximate timelines
9–12 months or more (but the first working version can be launched in 3–4 months) |
*These timelines are general estimates. A detailed project scope and requirements analysis will provide a more accurate timeline specific to your project.