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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 at FirstRand Group
- Carla Di Castro, Senior Global Sourcing Manager at Workday
- Gerry Holmes, Director of IT, Canadian Cancer Society (ret.)
- Rick Johnson, IT Manager at St. Lawrence County Information Technology Department
- Sherif Sheta, CIO Advisor at CCRM
- Stratton Penberthy
- Three anonymous contributors
Your Challenge
- As IT services and products continue to become outsourced, IT is becoming 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.
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.
Info-Tech Academy
Get Info-Tech Certified
Train your staff and develop a world-class IT team.
An active membership is required to access Info-Tech AcademyNew to Info-Tech Academy? Learn more here
Vendor Management Course
Get more from your vendors than just a bill.
This course makes up part of the Financial Management Certificate.
Course information:
- Title: Vendor Management Course
- 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
Decide what attributes make a vendor indispensable to your organization.
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
Right-size vendor classifications for your organization.
Classify your vendors.
- Vendor Classification Tool
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
Create a vendor information sheet for a strategic vendor.
- Strategic Vendor Information Sheet
Create a vendor information sheet for a tactical or operational vendor.
- Tactical/Operational Vendor Information Sheet
Create a vendor information sheet for a commodity vendor.
- Commodity Vendor Information Sheet
Customize vendor scorecards.
- Vendor scorecard
Customize vendor feedback cards.
- Vendor Feedback Cards
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
$ Saved
Days Saved
Testimonial
City of Toronto
$45,000
90
Scott Bickley has incredible knowledge and expertise in the area. The first time I have encountered this - he provided pre-call notes with relevant material for the discussion. He shared insights from his work experiences, research, and confirmed observations of trends. We appreciated his recommendations on approach, suggestions to consider and implement, and advice on how to handle pain points and issues..we definitely would like to work with him again!! He is professional and excellent!!
Peoples Bank
$129
N/A
Best - Allowed discussion with an experienced individual/consultant on pertinent topics. Worst - Webinars might provide more value for those who need visual input as well as auditory.
St. Lawrence County
$12,949
30
No worst. Professional and realistic insight and advice; you guys are awesome!!
Moog Inc
$129K
15
Best: insights shared validated the internal work we've done so far and the direction we were looking at. Expecting further value from ongoing guidance when we hit rough patches.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
$6,245
7
Good analysis and great suggestions to move forward.
Veterans United Home Loans
$37,519
30
The best part of this experience is the models/templates and step by step instructions. Honestly I have not found a worst part!
