When was the last time you actually had a decent experience working with a vendor? Depending on who you are trying to contact and work with, it can either be an extraordinarily pleasant or an extraordinarily painful experience. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to work with vendors at all? What if you could just contact a trusted resource who could handle everything for you? Well, you’re in luck; that just so happens to be what vendor management is all about!
You might be surprised by the many benefits that come from vendor management services. Here are just a few of them.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of working with a managed service provider is that you don’t have to memorize multiple points of contact for each of the many vendors that you work with. No more fumbling around through your contacts list to find the contact information for each of your vendors; instead, you contact your one point of contact and they will take care of the rest. It’s way easier to handle than calling each individual vendor—especially if their services intertwine in any noticeable way.
To explain just how valuable this might be, let’s consider a real-life scenario that you might encounter. Let’s say that you have a Voice over IP system for your business. This means that you have a software solution that enables you to make calls. Naturally, this system will require some configuration, especially if you are opting to have the system hosted off-site by a service provider. This means that your VoIP solution and your hosting provider are essentially linked, meaning that in order to resolve an issue with your system, you might have to contact both your VoIP provider AND your hosting provider, hoping that at least one of them will have the answers you might need to get operations back in appropriate order.
Now, if you take advantage of vendor management, you call one contact, who will get all the details of your needs, then reach out to all vendors involved to resolve your issue. Way better, right?
Consider the previously mentioned scenario. How much time do you think you are spending on the phone with those vendors while trying to coordinate your services and get all of the details straight? We know exactly how much: TOO much. Considering the fact that, again, services might be intertwined, you might have to make multiple calls to multiple vendors, taking valuable time out of your day that could be better spent on other tasks.
The problem, of course, is that oftentimes other tasks simply cannot be done without access to the solutions provided by vendors. It is better to trust a technology expert with this responsibility so that you can dodge both the headache and the hit to your productivity. While the provider solves the problem, you can focus on other tasks. It’s a win-win scenario!
Vendor management might be just the right tool for your business to push back the everyday annoyances of working with vendors. To learn more about what we can do for your business, reach out to us at 301-571-5040.
About the author
Washington Works has been serving the Bethesda area since 2005, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.
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