Vendor Management: Always Have a Backup
I would like to introduce a new competency to the Vendor Management team. . .
It’s called “always have a backup”.
At the very least, you, as the vendor management team, should always be doing market research to know:
The competitors to your vendors,
What they offer, and
Their price point.
This will give you added understanding and leverage as you interact with your current vendors.
My actual recommendation?
For every critical business process and service – always have a backup way of getting it done.
If you are a smaller business, the backup may be manual and awkward. That is OK. If something does wrong with a vendor, you are not stuck – you can keep going.
If you are a mid-sized business or larger, I would advise you to always dual source everything that your business absolutely needs. That way, your company will always have an option should a vendor fail. As well, if your vendors know they can be replaced, they will likely be more attentive.
“Hey”, you say, “That sounds like Business Continuity -not Vendor Management!”
Yes, it does.
In the very first blog post of this series, I said that Compliance and Vendor Management need to be the same team. If not, they need to work together very closely as each team has what the other team needs.
Let me add one more team to make this a perfect trifecta.
Your company should have a team called “Business Continuity”, “Business Resilience Team”, or the old name of “Disaster Recovery”.
Remember when I talked about getting a document that outlines the flow of all your business processes?
That is the team that has this document.
If I were running a business, I would make Compliance, Vendor Management, and Business Continuity – one team.
This is the trifecta that can make your business run smoothly, compliant, and with resilience. This is the team can keep you from bad vendor issues and will make sure you are running on the best vendors – and with backups.