Automating Vendor Onboarding for a Fortune 500 Retailer

Promenta reduced vendor onboarding time from 3 weeks to 2 days with an end-to-end SAP supplier data workflow for a global retail leader.
Client
A Fortune 500 retail group
Industry
Retail and Distribution
Region
North America and EMEA
Time to value
9 weeks from kick-off to first automated onboarding
3 weeks to 2 days
Average vendor onboarding time
87%
Of onboarding steps now automated
2,100
Vendors onboarded in the first year
The challenge

What was standing in the way

Onboarding a new supplier took three weeks and touched four teams, none of whom shared a system. Procurement collected details by email, finance rekeyed banking data into SAP, compliance chased tax certificates separately, and the requesting buyer had no way of seeing where the request had stalled.

Because banking details arrived as email attachments, the process also carried a standing fraud exposure that the internal audit function had flagged in two consecutive reviews.

  • Three week average onboarding time against a two day commercial target
  • Supplier banking details exchanged over unsecured email
  • No status visibility for the requesting buyer
  • Duplicate vendor records created whenever a request was resubmitted
The solution

How Promenta approached it

Promenta replaced the email chain with a single guided request that runs end to end inside SAP. The supplier submits their own data once, compliance and finance review in parallel rather than in sequence, and the vendor record is created in SAP only after every check has passed.

  • Supplier-facing request form that feeds SAP directly, with no rekeying
  • Parallel review by procurement, finance and compliance
  • Bank detail verification before the vendor record is created
  • Duplicate check against the full existing vendor master
  • Automatic escalation when an approval step exceeds its service level
The results

What changed

Onboarding now completes in two working days on average, and buyers can see exactly which step a request is sitting on. The rekeying of banking data into SAP was eliminated entirely, which closed the audit finding that had been open for two years.

  • Onboarding reduced from three weeks to two days
  • 87 percent of process steps automated
  • Supplier banking data no longer transmitted by email
  • Both outstanding internal audit findings closed
Our buyers stopped calling procurement to ask where a supplier request was, because they could simply look. That alone changed how the team spends its day.
Director of Procurement Operations
Fortune 500 Retail Group

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