Evidence based vendor management is a hot topic. Many vendor relationships and overall vendor management strategies are still characterised by a reliance on personal opinion and intuition. The difference in process maturity around initial procurement and ongoing vendor management still appears great in many cases.
Apr 22
Traoloch Collins, CEO, ServiceFrame discusses some approaches to understanding whether your SLA reports are producing valuable information. ServiceFrame is a leading software as a service governance tool for Shared Services and Vendor Management.
Apr 06
Innovation is of value in shared services as it helps teams to get better results more efficiently. People also enjoy trying new ways to do things and take pride in the results. Our clients have spoken to us lots about innovative ways of working. We all know that they key to innovation is the ability to share ideas and information with people who share the same challenges and opportunities as we do.
Apr 01
Risk is a key element of best practice Shared Services Governance. Yet it is often overlooked in the context of customer satisfaction surveys and SLA reporting. Risk reporting is an important as it is the process of identifying the factors that may lead to a deterioration in either SLA performance and/or customer satisfaction. Risk management is about managing the future. But it is difficult. In order for risk management to work effectively it is necessary for all team members to be risk conscious and risk focus. The common practice of sitting down and ‘identifying’ risks just before a report needs to be sent to senior managers is at best unreliable and incomplete and at worst ‘window dressing’.
Mar 29
Most organisations have several ‘tiers’ of vendors. Vendors may be ‘tiered’ based on a variety of criteria such as deal size, criticality of service delivered, regulatory impact etc. In all cases client organisations will apply varying levels of risk, issue and performance management depending upon the Tier the supplier fits into. It is a very sensible approach but most organisations struggle to ensure that vendors in the same tier are managed to the same level and consistently. Tiering creates the illusion of consistent vendor management. Why does this problem arise?
Mar 24
Shared Services Governance is typically characterised by SLA , Issue and Risk Spreadsheets – together with e-mails going backwards and forwards tracking progress on updates to spreadsheets. This approach is extermely manual, error prone and inconsistent. Join our webinar to learn about the innovative new way to drive efffective governance in Shared Services – an approach that can be deployed rapidly and at low cost. Continue reading »
Mar 19
Traditionally ongoing management of KPIs, Risks and Issues in managed services has been labour intensive and error prone. World class service providers are now moving away from spreadsheet and e-mail based management to a more robust and consistent approach. An approach which ensures they can spend less time on creating spreadsheets and tracking data and more time analysing performance and reviewing service quality.
Mar 18
Management of KPIs, Risks and Issues in sourcing relationships has been inconsistent, labour intensive and error prone. Organisations are now moving away from spreadsheet and e-mail based management to a more robust and consistent approach. An approach which ensures they can spend less time on creating spreadsheets and tracking data and more time analysing performance and reviewing service quality.
Mar 15
Many companies use balanced score cards to track vendor and supplier performance. They vary in quality and consistency of use. More and more client organisations are now building capability to ensure that sourcing performance is manage consistently and objectively. This requires a move away from balanced or performance cards which vary from vendor to vendor. It also requires a move away from measures which can be subjective or which are not clearly understood or comparable across vendors. It is often referred to as evidence based supplier management.
Mar 06
Supplier Managers need to manage service performance and risk aswell as cost on an ongoing basis. Using Spreadsheets to manage SLAs or Vendor Balanced Scorecards and Risks is time consuming. It also leads to inconsistent reporting and ultimately becomes very difficult to aggregate performance to get an accurate picture of supplier performance at an organisational level.
