Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, chances are you have some experience working with vendors. Your business certainly depends on the products they provide, but how is your relationship with vendor management holding up? Let’s take a look at one particular anecdote that displays the pains of vendor management and how working with a managed service provider can alleviate the stress associated with it.
Let’s say that you reach out to one of your vendors about an issue you are having with an application you use every day. You want to make it work for your business, but in order to do so, you have to adjust settings and allow it to connect to other applications—applications that are not necessarily managed by the same vendor. Before you know it, you’re going down the vendor rabbit hole and contacting multiple different vendors for what you thought was a simple question. By the time the problem gets resolved, you find yourself out several hours of productive work.
And that’s the best-case scenario. What happens when you can’t find the correct answer to your problem? What happens if, after all that effort, the answer still eludes you? You’ll have to call the vendors tomorrow and try again, or even worse yet, give up entirely. This makes all the effort even more worthless, as the frustration could easily lead you to just opt for a different approach.
The fact of the matter is that the more products you add to your infrastructure, like software solutions and hardware components, the more complicated your infrastructure gets. And when your infrastructure gets complicated, so too can your relationships with the countless vendors you deal with on a regular basis. You might have a designated point of contact for each individual vendor you work with, and your contacts list will just grow in accordance with the number of vendors.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just have one point of contact for all of your vendors?
If you want to make managing your business’ relationships with vendors that much easier, we highly recommend working with a managed service provider. The biggest challenge when navigating your vendors is the many different points of contact that come from working with them, so minimizing points of contact becomes paramount to streamlining the process.
This is what working with a managed service provider does; it creates a single point of contact for any and all of your technology needs. Need a hand setting up a new software solution for your business? Sounds like the perfect time to give your managed service provider a call. How about setting up a new workstation or getting support for problems you are having with networking? Your managed service provider can help with that too. You don’t have to worry about contacting multiple people just to solve one simple, or even complex, problem. Your managed service provider can do the necessary outreach for you!
Business Solutions & Software Group can be that managed service provider. To learn more about how we can help your business, reach out to us at (954) 575-3992.
