The vendors you use for your business are extremely important, but they aren’t so important that working with them should actually hurt your business. If you consider how much time the average vendor takes up, and multiply that by the number of vendors you have, you are likely spending a lot of time and money just dealing with these sometimes impossible relationships. In today’s blog, we will tell you how to get out from under time-consuming vendor relationships.
Do You Have a Lot of Vendors?
If you work with a lot of companies, you probably have a near-constant headache trying to navigate your relationships with all of them. If you consider that every service or product your business uses or resells comes with a relationship, it adds up to a lot of time being on the phone or in meetings with these vendors. That’s before they want to expand that relationship.
What is Vendor Management?
Vendor management is the process of having a dedicated strategy to manage your vendors and to manage the customers that use you as one. Consider how many relationships that is for a mom-and-pop shop, let alone a growing business that needs to find solutions to help manage their growth. Let’s go through some of the variables of a comprehensive vendor management strategy.
Inventory Your Vendors
The first step to better manage your vendor relationships is to know who you are working with. That’s why you need to immediately inventory every company your business does business with, and what they do for you. You also need to create a list of all the businesses that do business with you and what they use your business for.
At Business Solutions & Software Group, our business is IT, so if we were going to help your business manage your vendors, we would make a list of all your technology vendors. You need to make a list of vendors: from the people that you purchase your computers from, your software from, and your security from to the people that service your printers and other hardware should they need it. Once you get finished with this list, you will likely be surprised at how long it is.
Once the list is created, you then need to consider the amount of time that each company on that list takes up. Once you start adding it up, you’ll be amazed that you get anything else done. Vendors notoriously take up a lot of your time and if they feel the need to keep your attention on them, whether it is to sell you more or just because there are issues with the dissemination of the goods and services rendered, this wasted time can get out of hand pretty fast.
Business Solutions & Software Group Vendor Management
Imagine for a moment that you could get everything you need out of your IT vendors without the headaches and copious amounts of time dealing with them. That’s exactly what our vendor management service can provide. Our team of knowledgeable technicians will run your vendor relationships so you can free yourself up to do more in your business, rather than taking a lot of time to work on it. As the single point of contact, we will field vendor meetings, deal with the problems that arise, and simply take the whole process off your plate so that you can focus on getting your business where it needs to be.
If you would like to talk to one of our IT professionals about our vendor management service or any other of our valuable IT services, give us a call today at (954) 575-3992.
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