What is Vendor Management? Practices for a New Era

Introduction

At the heart of streamlined procurement lies a successful vendor management program. When successful, these programs help businesses save money, improve service quality, and reduce risks when working with their vendors (also referred to as suppliers) from the start of the deal to its end.

Without effective vendor management processes, organizations are more vulnerable to risks such as value leakage, contract disputes, unfulfilled deliverables, and even third-party breaches.

In this post, we’ll review the importance of vendor management and how contract management software can help improve its effectiveness.

What is Vendor Management?

Vendor management involves finding and choosing suppliers based on their work quality, setting expectations for their work, handling payment processes, and resolving any problems or disagreements.

Typical vendor management activities involve:

Researching vendors
Obtaining quotes, turnaround time, capabilities, etc.
Negotiating contracts
Controlling costs
Ensuring on-time payments
Ensuring service/product delivery

Who is Responsible for Vendor Management?

An organization can spread vendor management responsibilities across several roles and departments, especially at the enterprise level. While roles might vary, vendor management is a collaborative effort that requires synchronization across multiple departments to ensure the organization maximizes the value of its relationships.

Here’s a breakdown of who typically holds responsibility:

Procurement – Identifies, qualifies, and selects the vendors. They’re also typically involved in negotiations and securing favorable contract terms.
Legal – Reviews vendor agreements to ensure optimal terms and ensures no legal risks are involved. They also help the company stay compliant with relevant regulations.
Finance – Manages the financial aspects of vendor relationships, including payments, invoicing, and budgeting related to vendor services or products.
IT – In cases where the vendor provides IT services or products, the IT team handles the technical aspects of vendor management, like system integrations, security assessments, and ongoing IT collaboration.
Operational Managers – Those working directly with the products or services the vendor will offer will run day-to-day vendor management. They provide feedback, report issues, and may even have a say in vendor selection if the vendor’s offerings directly impact their operations.
Executive Management –Top-tier managers or the C-suite will step in if the vendor’s role is critical to the company’s core operations or if significant investments are at stake.
Risk Management or Compliance – In heavily regulated industries or where there’s a high level of inherent risk (e.g., banking, healthcare), these teams manage ongoing evaluations to ensure compliance and risk mitigation.

Key Stages and Processes

Define Business Goals – Establish clear objectives and outcomes the business aims to achieve through vendor relationships.
Sourcing and Determining Vendor Qualification – Determine specific criteria for vendor selection and engage potential suppliers that align with these standards.
Assess Risk – Conduct due diligence by evaluating potential vulnerabilities and threats associated with a vendor before entering a formal relationship.
Vendor Contracts and Onboarding – Finalize terms of engagement through contracts and facilitate a smooth integration of the vendor into the business ecosystem.
Ongoing Collaboration – Maintain consistent communication and joint efforts with vendors to ensure business operations and objectives are aligned.
Payment – Execute timely and accurate financial transactions per agreed terms to maintain a healthy vendor relationship.
Evaluating Performance – Regularly review and analyze vendor’s deliverables and performance metrics against established benchmarks.
Off-boarding – Strategically conclude the business relationship, ensuring a smooth transition and mitigating potential disruptions.

Why Is Vendor Management Important For Enterprises?

As you can see, a lot is involved with vendor management that spans the lifeline of the entire relationship.

When it comes to large enterprises, this landscape becomes even more intricate and is a crucial part of operational success.

Effective vendor management ensures cost-efficiency and risk mitigation and propels strategic alignment across various business units. As these corporations often deal with a large number of diverse suppliers, providing clarity, consistency, and value in these relationships becomes paramount.

By refining and prioritizing vendor management processes, enterprises can foster more collaborative partnerships, hold vendors accountable to their obligations, and unlock more potential for innovation and growth.

Let’s dig a little deeper into some of the significant benefits of effective vendor management below:

1. More accurate vendor selection

A well-structured vendor management program integrates a systematic approach to evaluating potential vendors, ensuring that the chosen partners align closely with an organization’s specific needs and objectives.

Through defined selection criteria, due diligence processes, and consistent performance benchmarks, accurate vendor selection becomes less of a gamble and more of a calculated decision. This precision minimizes potential risks associated with vendor partnerships and optimizes resource allocation, enhancing operational efficiency.

Overall, a properly run vendor management program transforms the traditionally complex vendor selection process into a streamlined, data-driven activity, ensuring that every partnership adds tangible value to the organization.

2. Lower risk of supply chain disruption

When you continuously monitor vendor performance and adherence to contractual obligations, you can anticipate issues that might lead to supply chain disruptions.

A well-run program supports your supply chain by:

Encouraging diversification – When you aren’t overly reliant on a single vendor for critical services, you have a built-in risk management strategy, as you can offset problems with one vendor by leaning on others.
Ensuring quicker resolutions – Strong vendor relationships and effective management result in better communication and faster response times from your vendors

3. Stronger third-party relationships

Short-term relationships provide short-term results. To maximize the business value from commercial engagements, you need to build a relationship that lasts for the long term. You need to maintain clear lines of communication to nurture trust between buyers and suppliers.

Vendor management makes this possible by enabling enterprises to preempt disputes and take proactive actions to resolve them before they arise.

With smoother step-by-step transitions, buyers and suppliers can lay the foundation for co-innovation and focus on mutually beneficial goals. This can open the door to more fluid collaboration, smoother contract negotiation, optimized cost savings, and better procurement relationship outcomes.

4. Fulfilment of business goals

Vendor management provides additional benefits by helping businesses reach their goals through cost-effective project management. These goals can be related to business performance, process improvement, or financial outcomes.

By effectively managing vendor contracts, you can maximize profitability and performance by getting the quality of service and efficiency from suppliers as was agreed upon in the underlying contract.

You can also ensure vendor projects stay on time and within budget with regular monitoring. This is key in maximizing value realization from supplier engagements, which helps you achieve your business goals.

How Contract Lifecycle Management Software Supports Vendor Programs

Vendor management programs traditionally focus on vendor sourcing and vendor information management.

One area that often gets less attention but holds significant transformation potential for an organization’s vendor management program is contract management. Enterprises can take their vendor management capabilities to the next level by underpinning it with a robust contract lifecycle management (CLM) system.

Here are ways a CLM can significantly improve your organization’s ability to align the supplier relationship to the underlying contract:

Seamless negotiation and contract review

Contract management enhances collaboration between internal stakeholders and external suppliers by streamlining negotiation. Using AI-aided legal review capabilities and automated workflows, you can expedite the contract review process by automatically identifying and resolving potential risks – such as missing clauses and clause deviations – before the vendor signs the onboarding agreement.

Following contract management best practices also bridges other gaps in traditional vendor management programs by allowing buyers to quickly assess historical insights on past vendor performance. You can then leverage these insights to gain an edge during negotiations.

Complete visibility into supplier performance

Contract management software offers total visibility into ongoing collaborations with the vendor, enabling you to monitor contract compliance and take remedial action whenever necessary.

With the right functionality, you can improve transparency by automating how you monitor your contractual obligations and service level fulfillment. Ideally, this happens through a unified dashboard that offers predictive AI-driven insights into potential compliance failures based on historical trends.

In turn, you can track and measure vendor performance and take a metrics-driven approach toward ensuring better business outcomes.

Stronger buyer-supplier relationships

Through in-depth analytics, buyers and suppliers can evaluate outcomes against contracted terms. CLM software enables both parties to access the same relationship data (performance, financial, etc.). This creates opportunities to identify and address areas of improvement, streamline communication, resolve disputes efficiently, and build trust.

Invoicing accuracy

Contract management software with capabilities to support the entire life of your contract from end-to-end can help plug value leakage by automatically reconciling invoices.

This helps eliminate invoice discrepancies – ensuring that what you pay tightly aligns with the underlying contract and what the vendor delivers. Given the vast sums of money involved in large outsourcing contracts, reducing value leakage directly and significantly impacts the bottom line.

Such features enable enterprises to spend less time resolving invoicing issues and more time focusing on strategic procurement goals.

Improving Vendor Contracts With AI

The real value of supplier engagements lies at the intersection of contract management and vendor management. But few systems in the market today successfully combine the two.

AI helps bridge the gap between vendor and contract management processes by using automation and advanced data extraction to help you maximize the ROI from your vendor relationships. This data-driven approach helps create a solid foundation for strategic third-party relationships by ensuring transparent governance, streamlining processes, and preventing value leakage.

Learn more about the best vendor management solutions by requesting a demo today. Discover why a CLM should be integral to your vendor management strategy.