With itself, the Internet brought new ways of doing business. Innovations in information technology produced new opportunities for everyone to enter, grow, and find their place in the market. Vendors utilized this platform to offer their services to businesses around the globe. They filled in the places where the regular employees couldn’t. Earlier, there were a few vendors in the market, but today, they are almost everywhere to help you out in your business and provide you with the advantages of the latest technology.
Who is a vendor?
Anyone who manufactures, supplies, contracts, or fills a need that you and your employees don’t provide in your organization in any way is known as a vendor. They help in your projects and find opportunities for your business expandability. They work for an organization on a non-permanent basis, and sometimes they are also termed as freelancers. But with their own employees to manage, organizations find overall business management and control a hectic task with the added contingent labor.
Vendor Management System (VMS)
Often, before selecting a vendor, you would like to assess its services, communicate your expectations and finalize a cost. You will easily find your to-do list filled with mundane tasks related to vendors. A Vendor Management System can coordinate the entire vendor relation process. It is an Internet-enabled application that acts as a mechanism for business to manage and obtain staffing services. It assists in acquiring a vendor, managing the delivery of goods and services, making payments and all other functions in between.
Which VMS software is best for you?
There is no size fits all solution when it comes to selecting a VMS software. Every tool has its advantage and area of usage and only you know which one will be best suited for your business. The following points will help you in evaluating the best VMS software which can reduce your cost and deliver more results. It should help you to predict future staffing needs and market trends. It should make candidate information and vendor information management easy.
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Ease of Integration:
Ultimately you are using a VMS for saving your time and efforts in procurement. But if the software itself is too difficult to work with, it is of no use. Select a software that makes it easy to communicate with your contingent workforce to pitch them your projects and train them with the business tools involved. Therefore, assess how easy it is to integrate the VMS software with the rest of your business.
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Compliance Regulations:
Compliance regulation outlines some of the best practices for companies. They need to obey all of the legal laws and regulations in regards to how they manage the business, their staff, and their consumer’s information. If your company falls under a compliance, you need to ensure that the outsourced services or products that you want to use will not break your compliance with the regulatory authority.
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Quality Assessment:
After outsourcing your project, you will need to assess the progress time to time. With a large project probably outsourced to multiple teams, it becomes very difficult to monitor the progress and quality at the same time. Select a VMS that lets you manage workflows, with readymade templates to allow for quick customization and deployment. It should deliver deep and tailored analytics and dashboards about vendor performance.
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Ease of Payment:
With the work outsourced to a vendor, you need to manage the payments. Here, a VMS with a time tracking tool could assist your contractor’s billable hours. It will make money management easy that so you always have a report of how much you have spent and on which service. Also, it should help you to prepare invoices with built-in invoice templates.
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Cost efficiency:
You can get the best solutions for vendor management at as low as $3/ month or as high as $7500/ month. Some of them are also free but there is a significant difference in terms of features in each. Therefore, you should make a list of your expectations from a VMS and decide a budget before selecting the right software solution.
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Security & Reliability:
The system that you choose for vendor management should be reliable and secure. Why secure? Because the contingent workforce will be given access to your data centers and company desktops for certain tasks. You should consider the security factor beforehand because your sensitive information could be sold to your competitors. Therefore, select a tool with which you can get reliable vendors for your business.
Simplified management and control of vendor contracts with VMS
A vendor management system works as an effective communications medium that allows quick and easy interaction between you and the contractors you work with. It will help you with task assignment, progress tracking, and work coordination. Nonetheless, a vendor management system will be a useful and cost-effective investment for your organization.
Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.