You provide a good or service to your clients, and therefore, could be considered a vendor to them. Similarly, your organization depends on the goods and services of other organizations, making your business a client as well. All of this can become quite complicated and convoluted, which brings up the question of how you’re managing all of these loose ends. Are you keeping your vendors managed as well as you should be?
What is Vendor Management?
Vendor management is how you manage the countless relationships you’ve built, allowing you to monitor them at a glance. If you’re not using a vendor management system, how are you determining how your vendors are helping your business’ needs? There are plenty of benefits to vendor management with the biggest one being the amount of time saved for everyone involved.
How Vendor Management is a Big Time-Saver
Consider how much time is spent on your organization’s part when you have to work with every single vendor in your network. If one vendor provides your workstations, another provides your servers, another provides your wireless networking components, and yet another provides network-attached printers, you have a complex web of connections that can complicate processes.
In the above scenario, imagine finding an issue with one of your printers. You reach out to that vendor, but they can’t identify the issue due to their subpar monitoring and diagnostic options. You reach out to the workstation vendor to confirm that the problem is somewhere in the middle, and by the time you figure out that the issue is with your router’s configuration and settings, you’ve wasted a whole lot of time that you can’t get back.
Furthermore, when the vendor resolves your issue, they may do so without addressing your organization’s important security needs. If they only care about what’s wrong with their device’s networking, then the rest will be left up to your other vendors, or worse yet, you. This presents an unnecessary risk, as any vulnerabilities on your network could create problems in the long run, all because your vendors don’t have your business at the top of their mind.
A Better Management System
Vendor management services from ClearView IT can help your business ensure that no stone is left unturned--especially when dealing with vendors. We create a single point of contact for your business’ vendor management needs, meaning that you don’t have to make eight phone calls to solve a single problem; that’s on us. You can instead focus on being productive with your time. From a business perspective, vendor management is hard to ignore.
ClearView IT can help your business better manage its vendors and IT resources. To learn more, reach out to us at 866-326-7214.
