Vendor Management Can Really Waste Your Time

As a business owner, vendor management is very important. Vendor relationships must be cultivated and maintained in some way on the off chance you need them for support. However, working with vendors can be stressful and downright frustrating at times. Let’s examine a specific situation that demonstrates these challenges and what you can do about them. 

Imagine that you need to contact a vendor about an issue you have with an application you use daily. You want it to work for your company, but you have to adjust the settings to allow it to work well with other applications on your network. These other applications are not necessarily managed by the same vendor. Next thing you know, you are calling other vendors left and right to see what your options are. Meanwhile, you have tasks piling up on your desk because you are too busy on the phone with vendors. A simple task turns into a wild goose chase for the correct solution to your problem. 

In the end, you might not even find the right answer. You might waste all of this time on the phone with vendors and be no closer to solving your problem. You’ll have to repeat the process again and again until someone is able to help you. This frustration might lead you to just give up on the solution entirely. Even if your research is telling you that it is the best tool for the job. 

When you have so many solutions on your infrastructure, including software and hardware components, vendor overload can happen. It can be difficult to keep everyone straight. Especially when you have countless points of contact for the plethora of vendors your business works with. It would be easier and much more simple to have a single point of contact for all vendors on your list, but surely something like this is too good to be true… right? 

Not necessarily—it turns out that managed service providers can offer a vendor management solution that can make working with your vendors much easier in the long term. The biggest issue is managing points of contact and dealing with them, so vendor management services allow you to bypass both of these by reaching out to one point of contact—your managed service provider—thus streamlining the process. 

A managed service provider effectively creates this single point of contact for your technology needs, vendor management included. If you need help setting up a new solution, we’ve got your back. If you need some support with that new solution, we’ve got that covered, too. We act as the mediator between you and your vendors so you can have one phone number on your contact list for all of your technology needs instead of a hundred. If you do need to get in touch with your vendors, just let us know and we can take care of that for you. 

4 Corner IT wants to help your business with managed services. To learn more, reach out to us at (954) 474-2204.