Vendor collaboration in Dynamics 365 SCM
How the Vendor Collaboration portal in F&O lets suppliers interact directly with the buyer's system — orders, ASNs, invoices, and the operational benefits.
For mid-to-large operations dealing with many suppliers, the cost of email-and-PDF-driven procurement is real: typos in order acknowledgments, missing shipping notices, AP departments chasing invoices, manual three-way matching. Vendor Collaboration in Dynamics 365 SCM gives suppliers structured, secure access to relevant parts of the buyer's system — they see their POs, acknowledge them, confirm shipments, submit invoices, and update their own contact data, all without email.
The architecture. Vendor Collaboration runs as a scoped Power Pages portal sitting in front of F&O's vendor data. Suppliers sign in with their own identities (Microsoft accounts, Entra B2B, or guest accounts depending on configuration), and the portal exposes specific entities scoped to the supplier's own data only. No supplier can see any data belonging to another supplier.
What suppliers do in the portal.
- View open purchase orders. Every PO sent to the supplier appears with full line detail, pricing, quantity, delivery date.
- Acknowledge purchase orders. The supplier confirms (accepts, partially accepts with proposed changes, or rejects) each PO. Acknowledgments post back as workflow notifications to the buyer's purchasing team.
- Submit advance shipping notices (ASNs). Before goods ship, the supplier creates an ASN with shipment date, tracking number, line-level quantities. The ASN arrives in F&O as expected receipt data.
- Submit invoices. The supplier creates an invoice referencing the PO and shipment, with line-level detail. The invoice queues in F&O's incoming-document pipeline for approval and posting.
- Update vendor master data. Address, contact, bank account changes are submitted by the supplier; the buyer's vendor master administrator approves or rejects.
- View payment status. The supplier sees which of their invoices are approved, paid, on hold, with promised payment dates.
- View consumption data — for vendor-managed inventory (VMI) scenarios, the supplier sees the buyer's inventory levels and consumption to plan replenishment.
Onboarding suppliers. Each supplier needs to be invited to the portal, granted appropriate roles, and assigned the relevant data scope. The onboarding flow can be self-service (the supplier requests access via a registration form, the buyer approves) or admin-driven (the buyer invites individually). Vendor users authenticate against their own organisation's identity provider through Entra B2B, so the supplier's IT controls their access lifecycle.
Permission scoping. A supplier user's roles control what they can see and do:
- Read-only view of orders and invoices.
- Active responder for acknowledgments and ASNs.
- Self-service editor for their own profile.
Different users at the same supplier can have different roles — a customer-service rep handles acknowledgments; an AP-side counterpart handles invoicing.
The buyer-side workflow. Inside F&O:
- Supplier acknowledgments appear in the purchasing buyer's workspace for review.
- Submitted ASNs queue for receipt processing in the warehouse.
- Submitted invoices flow into the vendor-invoice approval workflow.
- Master-data change requests route to the vendor-master administrator.
Benefits.
- Reduced AP friction — invoices arrive as structured data, not PDFs requiring data entry.
- Improved on-time receiving — ASNs tell the warehouse exactly what's arriving.
- Faster cycle time — supplier responses are minutes, not days of email back-and-forth.
- Better master data — suppliers maintain their own contact and banking data.
- Audit trail — every interaction logged.
Limits.
- Supplier adoption — small suppliers may resist portal use; need a fallback for paper / email.
- Setup overhead per supplier — onboarding each supplier is real work; only worth it for suppliers with meaningful volume.
- EDI overlap — large suppliers may already use EDI; the portal duplicates effort.
Operational reality. Vendor Collaboration pays off when most procurement volume flows through portal-enabled suppliers. Pilot with the top 20% of suppliers (by spend or volume) first; expand from there.
Related guides
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- Batch jobs and batch groups in Dynamics 365 FinanceHow F&O's batch framework runs background processing — batch jobs, batch groups, schedules, server allocation, and operational monitoring.
- Catch weight items in Dynamics 365 SCMHow F&O handles variable-weight inventory like meat, cheese, and produce — the dual unit-of-measure model, catch weight tags, and the operational gotchas of selling by one unit and inventorying by another.
- Consignment inventory in Dynamics 365 SCMHow F&O handles consignment inventory — vendor-owned stock on customer premises and customer-owned stock at our locations, the accounting and operational rules, and the consumption posting model.
- Cost management and inventory closing in F&OHow Dynamics 365 Supply Chain handles inventory costing — closing runs, recalculation, marking, and the differences from Business Central.