Solving Your Vendor Management Challenges
You’re busy; the last thing you want to do at the end of your workday is deal with your internet provider on increasing prices. Or make sure every one of your vendors is compliant and in alignment with your goals. Unfortunately, the reality is that you don’t have time to do this. If you can take time out of your day, lucky you!
So now what? You can’t just let your vendor problems go to the side. Fortunately, there’s always a solution and in this case a few solutions. You can hire someone to take on the responsibilities you can’t get to during the day, use a vendor management system (VMS), or partner with a managed service provider (MSP).
Before we get into how an MSP can help your business with vendor management, let’s touch on the difference between an MSP and VMS.
Managed Service Provider (MSP) – Is a company that remotely manages a client’s I.T. infrastructure and end-user systems.
Vendor Management Services (VMS) – Is a software system designed to reduce costs, improve vendor performance, and identify and manage risk.
The key difference between the two is that an MSP is a team of professionals working to help you reach your goals whereas a VMS is just software designed to manage vendors. So, an MSP is real people calling your internet service provider getting you better service and lower rates while a VMS is a tool that collects data, automates transactions, and aids in on-boarding. With the data collected by your VMS you can then assess and manage vendor performance. Therefore, you still end up doing the work that you don’t have time for.
It seems we never have enough time in our day for all the tasks we need to accomplish, not to mention the tasks we want to accomplish as well. After an eight-hour workday, if not longer, you’re stuck on the phone with one of your vendors discussing your contract. Yuck. Not what you want to be doing.
However, utilizing vendor management services by your MSP you don’t have to spend time doing that anymore. Since MSPs work with many vendors we are able to find your business the best vendor from the start, find the best price, and ensure they are providing quality service to keep your business moving forward. MSPs are able to do this simply because they have the personnel that your business may not have to research, negotiate, and maintain relationships with many different vendors.
Saving time is great, but even better than that is making sure your vendors are compliant and holding up to their standard. Otherwise, you could be wasting more time dealing with vendors who are not performing as they should, or worse than wasting time and money, dealing with non-compliant vendors as this could put your business at risk. If your vendors lack proper security measures this opens a door to your business for potential threats. You don’t want that or have time to deal with a breach. Not to mention the financial and reputational costs associated with one.
This risk can be mitigated by having a team of professionals manage your vendors for you. Through audits and relationship building with vendors, MSPs are able to ensure the vendors you partner with are compliant and in-line with your business goals.
Who doesn’t like saving money where they can? However, the ability to find opportunities that optimize costs can be hard to come by if you don’t have the personnel devoted to doing so.
Fortunately, a part of vendor management with an MSP is to optimize costs with each of your vendors. This is possible because managed service providers work with a ton of vendors and chances are that they have worked with your vendor more than you have. Because of these relationships and knowledge on offerings, the technicians behind your MSP partnership are able to compare prices within your vendor market and use their knowledge on competitor prices to get a cheaper price or work out other deals with your current vendor.
If you think your organization could benefit from an MSP handling your vendor management, then all you have to do next is find an MSP that aligns with your organization. (If your business is located in Michigan, don’t forget to check us out.)