ENTERPRISE IT
ALL CHANGE
And vendors themselves are changing.
Whereas once they positioned themselves
as transactional partners – you spend, but
you save – the new playbook cuts them
to different lengths. Those transactional
partnerships survive, but have become
secondary (even tertiary) to deeper
relationships with ongoing vendors who
continue to offer more breadth and benefit
in a consolidated product, or strategic
partners, whose products and services help
a given company to achieve its strategic goals.
The management of this tiered system of
vendors is a tricky balance, not least because
of the complexity. And companies will see
short-term (actual) costs rise as they employ
manpower and software to examine their
options and the fruits of their decisions.
Where a multi-vendor approach is taken,
costs will again be higher. You can’t balance
risk by hedging. Longer range forecasting and
disaster planning should be able to justify
the case for higher spend, and should be
considered part of a wider business strategy.
Most importantly of all, KPIs must be set to
identify the ongoing success or otherwise
of any given vendor relationship.
SHARED INITIATIVES
Keith Murphy, from Purchase Control, thinks
KPIs can do more than tell you whether your
partner is delivering according to contract.
“Such monitoring can help both parties identify
and leverage opportunities they might not
have detected otherwise, allowing for shared
initiatives for growth, penetration into new
markets or the development of additional
production refinements and new products.”
As a purveyor of a cloud-based procure-
ment system, he is also unsurprisingly greatly
in favour of using technology to manage
vendors, including AI.
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