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ServiceNow Employee

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There’s been a lot of buzz about digital transformation in the marketplace and how it can transform your organization. However, what about the vendors and suppliers that contribute to your organization? Aren’t they key components of catalyzing digital transformation in your organization? As per Gartner – yes they are.  As organizations hire additional vendors, “Vendor management leaders are becoming increasingly important as they represent the critical link between organizations' internal capabilities and the external digital business ecosystem. They are accountable for developing and deploying strategies to acquire and manage IT services and products from internal and external providers to drive successful business outcomes." 

So how do you ensure you’re deriving as much value as you can from your relationships with your vendors? How do you ensure you’re both driving towards the same goal?  

If you attended Knowledge19, you may have seen the preview for Vendor Manager Workspace in our Chief Product Officer, CJ Desai’s product keynote. He spoke about the launch of a net new application in the New York release called the Vendor Manager Workspace, your one-stop shop to manage vendors.

 Our target problem space:

Effectively managing vendors is an age-old problem that’s still impacting organizations today.

  1. Teams lack a single and centralized location to access key information and performance data about their vendors. Sure OneNote, Excel, SharePoint, sticky notes, etc. are all methods of tracking vendor information but how quickly are you able to assemble a point of view on the health of a vendor engagement?
  2. Due to disparate sources of truths, teams are manually collating, scrubbing, and calculating performance data to determine a vendor’s performance. How often do you maintain that data to keep it accurate and up-to-date if it’s manually collated?
  3. As a result of the disparate sources of truth and the need for manual calculation, there is lack of rapid accessibility to current vs historical performance of vendors that doesn’t require hours of updating data sources.

With these 3 combined, it makes it difficult to objectively assess a vendor’s performance which can include performance based on quantitative and qualitative factors such as their responsiveness, the ability to resolve issues, stakeholder’s satisfaction with collaborating with the vendor and so forth. Also, if you’ve adopted a regional procurement or sourcing strategy, it’s difficult to ensure each team is leveraging the same framework to assess vendors so that they can be compared. 

The Solution:

The Vendor Manager Workspace provides a standardized and scalable solution to manage your vendors and address the pain points above.

  1. The Vendor Directory provides a single, centralized repository of all the vendors you and your company manage. You don’t need to sort through emails or files to find key vendor information, you have immediate access to the most important information about your vendors, all in one location.
  2. The Vendor Profile surfaces key performance metrics that are automatically calculated daily, the cadence of which you can modify. The application capitalizes on the operational data you collect on the platform- such as services, incidents, service level agreements, outages, etc. and, using Performance Analytics, bubbles that up into insightful visuals and indicators so that you have full transparency into the health of your vendors. In addition, we’ve integrated with key platform applications to enrich the workspace with key contextual information, such as contracts, contract scope, active SLAs, etc.
  3. Each metric breakdown provides immediate access to current versus historical data by its related breakdown which eliminates the need to manually collate and update performance data to derive insights.
  4. Integrations with other applications on the platform such as Vendor Risk Management, Contract Management, Service Level Management, etc. enriches the amount of contextual information you can immediately access to understand the true health of your vendors.

You can now redirect the time you and your team spent focusing on manual, redundant tasks to more strategic items such as fostering a more fruitful relationship with your vendors.  

 Let’s take a deeper look into the Vendor Manager Workspace:

 Vendor Directory

  • The Vendor Directory enables you to view all the vendors that you and your company manage in one location. We surface key attributes such as the total cost of their active contracts, rank, type, location, etc. In addition, you can create create custom filtered lists of vendors by their attributes if you want easy access to specific vendors.

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Vendor Profile

  • In the Vendor Profile, you’ll see a metric called Vendor Score. This metric enables you to obtain a quick pulse of the health of your vendor . For the New York release, the Vendor Score metric is comprised of 2 out-of-the-box metrics:
    • Average Performance Score of Service Offerings, which measures the average performance of the vendor’s active service offerings.
    • Vendor Satisfaction, which measures the level of satisfaction of your stakeholders (internal or external) who collaborate with your vendor.

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  • The Vendor Score is calculated as follows:

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  • The Average Performance Score of Service Offerings takes the average of all Performance Scores of the vendor’s service offerings. We obtain Performance Score data from Service Portfolio Management, for more information please see product documentation here
  • Vendor Satisfaction is measured from assessment results collected for each vendor from the OOTB Vendor Satisfaction Assessment. 

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Vendor Profile - Breakdowns

  • When you click into any metric on the Vendor Profile, it leads you to the metric breakdown view which provides immediate access into current versus historical performance of each metric by its associated breakdown.

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 Vendor Manager Workspace Integrations

We’ve integrated our application with other key applications such as:

  • Vendor Risk Management, which enables you to view the vendor’s risk rating in the Vendor Profile:

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  • Service Portfolio Management, which enables you to collect service offering performance data and view active service offerings

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  • Contract Management, which enables you to view the vendor’s active contracts

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  • And more!

 

The Vendor Manager Workspace is your one-stop shop for vendor management activities. For more information, you can visit the following links: 

 

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