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 procurement system , he is also unsurprisingly greatly in favour of using technology to manage vendors , including AI . technologymagazine . com 89