Sales management and customer management tools are now a standard technoogy enabler. The reason is simple – key customer relationships need to be managed effectively and consistently in order to protect on going revenue streams. Managing these relationships using spreadsheets is time consuming and error prone. More importantly it leads to mistakes and costs sales and money. So why do you use spreadsheets to manage your Vendor Relationships?
Many organisations are now starting to ask this question. Procurement has always had strong enablers to support purchasing but organisations are now recognizing that real VALUE can be only be measured by effective ongoing vendor management. This involves consistent and effective tracking of KPIs in contracts and SLAs, of Sourcing Issues and of Sourcing Risks. Clear visibility of the interaction between performance, risks and issues at vendor level gives the only reliable indication of how well vendors are delivering on their obligations – everything else is intuitive. Systematic reporting on issues, risks and performance across all vendors also allows you to easily aggregate information to give you an accurate picture on performance across all vendors.
So – the message is simple – if you are still managing vendors using spreadsheets – stop – move to a best practice solution to manage vendors systematically based on evidence.
