Manage Your Vendors Before They Manage You

Maximize the value of vendor relationships.

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Contributors

John Alexis, Director of IT Services, GTAA
Deepak Bansal, Enterprise Head of IT Vendor Management, Envision Healthcare
Ronald Flockhart, Group Sourcing Head, FirstRand Group
Carla Di Castro, Senior Global Sourcing Manager, Workday
Gerry Holmes, Director of IT, Canadian Cancer Society (ret.)
Rick Johnson, IT Manager, St. Lawrence County Information Technology Department
Sherif Sheta, CIO Advisor, CCRM
Stratton Penberthy
Three anonymous contributors

As IT services and products continue to become outsourced, IT is increasingly dependent on external vendors, and a transaction-based approach becomes insufficient to guarantee continued value.
When IT does not manage these vendors properly, performance levels can drop and fail to deliver essential services – and IT is left accountable.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

All vendors are not equal. Invest your vendor management efforts where they can deliver the best return; focus on the vendors that are most important to your business. Classify and prioritize your vendors to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Vendor management is an ongoing commitment. From contracting to renewal, a successful vendor management office (VMO) depends on your ability to create repeatable, iterative processes that can flourish over many years of diligent work.

Impact and Result

Prioritize and classify your vendors with quantifiable, standardized rankings.
Focus on your strategic vendors first, then, year over year, work through every classification of vendor.
Standardize your processes for transitioning in new vendors, maintaining communications, and monitoring performance.
Create clear escalation pathways and contingency plans for addressing vendor underperformance.
Codify your tailored, best-practice methodology for managing vendor relationships.

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should standardize your vendor management practices, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Manage Your Vendors Before They Manage You – Executive Brief

1. Prioritize vendors

Create a prioritized inventory of your vendors.

2. Classify vendors

Classify your vendors using Info-Tech’s best-practice C.O.S.T. quadrant.

3. Document vendors

Standardize your approach to vendor management: consolidate vendor information, build an escalation chain, create internal and external scorecards, and document the entire process.

Guided Implementations

This guided implementation is a seven call advisory process.

Guided Implementation #1 - Prioritize vendors

Call #1 - Review inventory tool.

Call #2 - Discuss what attributes make a vendor indispensable to your organization.

Guided Implementation #2 - Classify vendors

Call #1 - Review Info-Tech’s classification system.

Call #2 - Validate your vendor classifications.

Guided Implementation #3 - Document vendors

Call #1 - Review the vendor information sheets and discuss any roadblocks.

Call #2 - Review the vendor scorecards and feedback cards.

Call #3 - Review meeting agendas and engagement plans.

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Vendor Management

Get more from your vendors than just a bill.
This course makes up part of the Financial Management Certificate.

Course information:

Title: Vendor Management
Number of Course Modules: 4
Estimated Time to Complete: 2-3 hours
Featured Analysts:
John Pinard, Sr. Research Director, Enterprise Applications
James Alexander, SVP of Research and Advisory, CIO Practice
Now Playing: Academy: Vendor Management | Executive Brief

Book Your Workshop

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Prioritize Vendors

The Purpose

Prioritize your vendors based on their importance to the organization.

Key Benefits Achieved

Prioritized list within the Vendor Inventory and Prioritization Tool.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Decide what attributes make a vendor indispensable to your organization.

1.2

Prioritize list of IT vendors.

Vendor Inventory and Prioritization Tool

Module 2: Classify Vendors

The Purpose

Classify your vendors to focus your vendor management efforts.

Key Benefits Achieved

Classified vendors.
A completed vendor inventory.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Right-size vendor classifications for your organization.

2.2

Classify your vendors.

Vendor Classification Tool

2.3

Complete the remaining fields of your inventory.

Vendor Inventory and Prioritization Tool

Module 3: Document Vendors

The Purpose

Document key information for each vendor and make a plan to maximize the value.

Key Benefits Achieved

Consolidated vendor information for each of your vendors.
A standardized approach to vendor management, comprising customized:
- Vendor scorecards
- Vendor feedback cards
- Vendor review aeeting agendas
- Completed Vendor Management Program Plan and meeting agenda

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Create a vendor information sheet for a strategic vendor.

Strategic Vendor Information Sheet

3.2

Create a vendor information sheet for a tactical or operational vendor.

Tactical/Operational Vendor Information Sheet

3.3

Create a vendor information sheet for a commodity vendor.

Commodity Vendor Information Sheet

3.4

Customize vendor scorecards.

Vendor Scorecard

3.5

Customize vendor feedback cards.

Vendor Feedback Cards

3.6

Customize meeting agendas.

Vendor Review Meeting Agenda Template
Vendor Management Team Meeting Agenda Template

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this Blueprint, and what our clients have to say.

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Testimonial

Cross Country Mortgage, Inc.

Guided Implementation

9/10

$2,261

Miller Zell

Guided Implementation

10/10

$14,446

The best part, is I was given insight into how to organize and make sense of the risks our 3rd part vendors may present. How to include and engage the business leaders in the ranking and goal topics. Worst- its a time intensive process to monitor, con...

ISG Central Services Ltd.

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

I was really impressed with the knowledge of the InfoTech analyst and would be very happy to engage for her support again. Thank you!

University of Johannesburg

Guided Implementation

9/10

$12,562

Surgical Care Affiliates

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Not all of the artifacts are designed to work together. Some have overlaps.

Pima Community College

Guided Implementation

10/10

$29,944

Saskatchewan Blue Cross

Guided Implementation

10/10

$50,000

Vision into vendor management was enlightening. Easy to see the final vision. Overwhelming amount of information and not sure if it will all work for our organization.

Ontario Pension Board

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

First Hope Bank

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Gordana presented several options for us to put a strategic plan in place to address the service level failures in our contract. It's going to take several months possibly a couple of years before we see the benefit of what we learned on our calls. However, what I learned will not apply only to this particular service provider, but all of our vendors.

Advocate

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Gordana did a great job explaining the workshop to me, as well as giving me some real world insights. I'm looking forward to our next conversation.

Westmoreland Mining LLC

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Great resources to help us vet future VAR partners. The worst part is there's a lot of information to digest and it will take a concerted effort and dedicated time to get through it all.

American Textile

Guided Implementation

9/10

N/A

Gordana is a job to work with. She knows I am new to this area, I feel that she will go above and beyond to help me understand Vendor Management.

Statistics New Zealand

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

National Restaurant Association

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

It was a very good discussion from start to finish. There was no worst part. We did run out of time, so another 15-30 minutes would have been helpful. However, I'm sure we can have follow up conversations to close any gaps.

Moog Inc

Workshop

8/10

N/A

Moog Inc

Workshop

8/10

N/A

Georgia Municipal Association

Guided Implementation

10/10

$10,000

I had the pleasure of speaking w/ Steven and Matthew during this call. Steven provided a lot of quality information regarding vendor management and followed through by providing solid documentation for me to review as well. I am looking forward to our ...

Curtins

Guided Implementation

10/10

$43,501

Westmoreland Mining LLC

Guided Implementation

8/10

$20,373

Clear communication and valuable tools.

City of Toronto

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Best part, ability for ME to quickly setup a call directly with a SME/analyst without having to go through someone else.

Summit Healthcare

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

I appreciated the information about the Risk Analysis tool to use to gauge the health of the vendors we deal with as an organization. Thanks for your vast knowledge about Vendor Management, Bernie!

Virginia Department of Social Services

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

This experience would have more value if it was done with other members of the team. In the future, could info-tech take a broad topic like this and invite known stakeholders.

Children's Hospitals and Clinics

Guided Implementation

10/10

$31,833

Great conversation. Great feedback on the RFI. Extremely helpful.

Sub-Zero Group, Inc.

Guided Implementation

10/10

$5,093

N/A

Toyota Canada Inc

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

Gordana completely understands our current state and has vast experience to pin-point exactly what we need. She is extremely helpful and our calls are very concise as she expertly guides us to the key aspects of what we need.

City of Toronto

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

Having access to an expert that has built and lead a vendor management office at the executive level.

Job and Family Services

Guided Implementation

9/10

$12,733

MARTA

Guided Implementation

9/10