Challenge

Companies across Latin America were managing supplier relationships across scattered spreadsheets, email chains, and slow manual approvals. Procurement, Finance, and Compliance were each working from different versions of the same information — with no shared system, no audit trail, and no way to surface supplier risk before it became a problem.

Three internal roles with different reading speeds and different decision rights needed to work from the same data. And the suppliers themselves — external companies who had never seen the platform before — needed to submit their own information through it. That’s four user types, two opposite cognitive loads, one system.

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The Architecture

Supplier360 is one platform with two opposite reading speeds.

The internal side — Procurement, Finance, Compliance — needs density: risk grades, D&B ratings, audit trails, document status, approval workflows. The external side — the supplier completing their own onboarding — needs simplicity: one question at a time, plain language, a clear answer to “why do we need this?”

Same product. Same data spine. Two completely different interfaces sized to two completely different jobs. The design decision was to hold both without collapsing either into a compromise.

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Research

I conducted interviews with stakeholders across Procurement, Finance, and Compliance to map existing workflows and identify where the process broke down. The pattern was consistent: manual processes introduced errors, document collection happened outside the system, and at-risk suppliers were only identified after problems had already escalated.

The supplier side of the platform required a separate research lens entirely — external users had no existing familiarity with the system and no professional obligation to engage with complexity. The onboarding experience had to be designed for a first-time user completing a regulatory requirement, not an internal analyst with daily access.

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The Flowchart

I mapped the full user journey across both sides of the platform before moving to interface design — tracing the pathways for each internal role and the external supplier through every stage of the onboarding and evaluation process.

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The System

Buyer side — risk and workflow

Procurement teams manage the full supplier portfolio through customisable onboarding workflows: document requests, status tracking, approval routing. The real-time dashboard surfaces at-risk suppliers across the portfolio without requiring manual investigation. D&B financial ratings, risk indicators, and country-level breakdowns are integrated at every evaluation stage — giving Finance and Compliance a single auditable view of supplier health.

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Buyer side — screening

Built-in evaluation tools pull D&B rating data — financial strength, risk indicator, Paydex score — directly into the supplier profile. The rating filter modal surfaces the full Dun & Bradstreet scale so analysts can set thresholds and filter the portfolio without leaving the platform.

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Buyer side — roles and permissions

Procurement, Finance, and Compliance each see the data their role requires. The permissions model — Admin, Manager, Finance, Compliance, Read-Only — is the structural mechanism that keeps three different reading speeds from interfering with each other.

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Supplier side — onboarding

The supplier-facing flow is a four-step wizard: Document Upload, Company Details, Review and Approval. Each step surfaces one task. Where a document or detail is required for regulatory reasons, the interface says why — Regulatory and Compliance, Accurate Records, Risk Mitigation — in plain language. This is consumer-grade UX clarity sitting inside an enterprise compliance tool. It was designed from scratch as a separate interface with a separate cognitive model, not as a simplified version of the buyer dashboard.

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Testing

I ran usability sessions with stakeholders from each internal role and with external users simulating the supplier onboarding flow. Key changes from feedback: filtering options expanded to reduce time-to-insight in the risk dashboard; workflow status visibility improved across team members; the supplier onboarding wizard refined to reduce drop-off at the document upload stage.

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Result

Supplier360 shipped as a commercial product, now live across Latin America as part of the CIAL Dun & Bradstreet platform suite. Companies moved their supplier portfolios off spreadsheets and into one auditable system — with D&B risk data integrated at every evaluation stage and suppliers completing their own onboarding without requiring manual intervention from the buyer’s team.