One of the most intriguing chalenges that is facing corporate america these days the inability of finance departments to identify  and keep accurate vendor contact information . This problem effects companies in a number of different ways and can add millions of dollars of unneeded cost to the task of interacting with suppliers . 

Having inaccurate data will make you spend valuable time resolving payment errors. Additionally, inacurate data can lead  to additional Customer service calls and costly  labor intensive work  associated with reconciling payments that are sent to wrong locations .  Let’s also not forget the costs of reissuing checks and chasing down signatures to reconcile spending issues. Your Procurement department will also spend alot of time setting up vendors multiple times in error which will use up valuable and expensive labor cycles  . Having inaccurate supplier information will also make any  enterprise  software implementations grow to be very expensive and problematic to perform across the enterprise. There are also the costs of NOT using automated payment technologies not to mention the inability to take early-payment discounts, confirm contract terms are being adhered to, or to ensure that employees work with preferred vendors 

Government fines can also be collected if a company has a supplier file filled with inaccuracies. B-Notice Fines are issued for every supplier that has an inacurate Tax Indentfication number. Most companies evaluate data quality projects because they qualitatively know these things are hurting them. 

One reason why companies are in this situation is that for years they have been looking at the Supplier Information Management situation as a project rather than a process. If corporate America would simply alter the way they looked at this growing problem they would realyze that they need to develop an organizational wide master data policy which would include both the intial collection of information as well as the ongoing maintenence of the data. 

If you are looking to get support from your organization for creating a master data acquisition policy you need only demonstrate the costs associated with having a poorly maintained vendor file. This will quickly get management attention and support. 
In any event, inaccurate Vendor File Management approaches are a universal pain point for most large enterprises and if you are trying to get momentum behind a cleansing project, the best approach is to strongly encourage tying the project back to dollar saving potential.  If you do not know where to start in the process of Supplier information management you can contact one of a number of on-demand service providers that can help you manage the process. 

One of the best solutions is to use the Supplier Information Management application of Lavante. Their application demo can be viewed at www.lavante.com.