Your organization works with many suppliers and vendors. And if you’re manually managing supplier quality, chances are noncompliances are hiding in your data and leaving you open to risks.

You’re searching through long email chains, deep folder structures, and complex spreadsheets to gain insights, which means you have murky visibility at best. Plus manual systems involve too many administrative tasks, so you’re short on time to drive important quality initiatives that improve the quality and safety of your products and services.

If you find yourself lost in a sea of documents and spending too many hours a week with administrative tasks, it might be time to embrace supplier quality management software.

Here are 10 more signs that it’s time to ditch manual processes and start using software to manage supplier quality.

1. Your Team Spends Too Many Hours Collecting Docs

With supplier quality management (SQM) software, suppliers use clear task lists to answer questions and upload documents, which are then automatically associated with the right locations, products, or materials.

2. Supplier Communication is Increasingly Difficult & Frustrating

Sending and tracking supplier tasks and compliance document requests all in one place improves supplier relationships and adds transparency for you and your suppliers.

3. You Dread Requests for Reporting Updates

A single source of truth for compliance statuses and searchable data means you can find answers in minutes for both planned and ad-hoc reporting.

4. Better Visibility Sounds Like a Far Away Dream

Instead of searching error-prone spreadsheets, see all your supplier qualification and compliance statuses in a single view and drill down into noncompliances with just a few clicks.

5. Key Info Is Buried in Long Email Threads

The phrase “I know it’s in here somewhere” won’t be in your vocabulary when everything you need is stored and organized as a single source of truth.

6. “Losing” Data or Supplier Documents is the Norm

The looming enemy of deep folder structures will be a thing of the past when you use the right software to manage suppliers, helping you ditch manual document management and data management via spreadsheets.

7. It Feels Like Your Job is Mostly Administrative Work

You’ll no longer sort through submitted docs, search for expiration dates, be blindsided by yearly renewals, or send dozens of emails to suppliers a day (that, let’s face it, go unanswered.)

8. Optimizing Strategy is Often on the Back Burner

The time saved through automating administrative work can be used to focus on strategy for important quality, safety, and compliance initiatives.

9. Data is Only Available When it’s Too Late

Get quick and easy access to the most up-to-date data and stop acting on old data, which often leads to redoing work.

10. You Can Only Access Data When You’re at Your Desk

Using cloud-based software to manage suppliers means you can access your information wherever you have an internet connection on your phone, tablet, or laptop.