Vendor Management Workflow – Eight Benefits

Why you need a set and repeatable vendor requests, approval, renewal, and termination process.

If your company is one huge machine and the various tools you use are important parts of this machine. A faulty component can cause chaos for the entire machine.

The returns your company gets from your investment in SaaS tools depends on how you manage your vendors.

While a spreadsheet can do the job for very small companies, once you’re past a handful of employees, the number of tools being used and the connections between different users becomes too complicated to handle manually.

A good SaaS vendor management system will help you stay in front of your SaaS purchases, usage, renewal or termination.

What are (SaaS) vendor management workflows?

A SaaS vendor management workflow refers to all the stages and processes that you follow in getting a new vendor onboard, building a working relationship, renewing or terminating your contract.

What is the vendor lifecycle, and what are the different stages of the SaaS vendor lifecycle? What do you need to do at each stage? What processes do you need to put in place to guarantee success at every stage?

Eight benefits of having a SaaS vendor management workflow

Why is vendor management important? What are the benefits of having a vendor management workflow in place for your company?

Visibility into your entire SaaS usage and spend

Shadow IT is still a major problem in large and medium-sized organizations. With a credit card and email, anyone in your company can onboard a new SaaS tool in minutes. These new software tools get access into your business operational data, without approval by the company.

Company-wide visibility into the vendors you’re dealing with helps you see into areas where SaaS spend optimization can be carried out, complete termination can/should be done and security breaches avoided.

A detailed SaaS vendor management workflow will help ensure all new vendors are vetted and approved by the company. This helps you see into your company’s SaaS usage, data access given to different SaaS tools and the total spend on SaaS.

Assurance that you’re using the best vendor for the job

A SaaS evaluation and selection system will help you choose the best SaaS app that will serve your purpose; and the vendor that will give you long term satisfaction. It will also help you enjoy competitive pricing from various vendors.

Consolidated vendor relationship

The key to getting the best from any SaaS product is a constant relationship with your vendor. Your relationship with your vendor does not end when you hit the sign-up button, or renew your subscription.

A vendor management workflow helps your company establish constant and directional communication with your vendor. This communication builds a healthy vendor-user relationship.

A healthy vendor-user relationship translates into increased negotiation power and opportunity, parallel growth of your business and the SaaS tool and assurance of the vendor’s trustworthiness and compliance with standards.

Greater value for your money

How do you know if you’re getting you money worth from your tool? Having a set procedure for SaaS vendor performance evaluation gives you visibility into what is working and what is not working.

Constant evaluation of the performance of your vendors lets you see whether you’re getting what you paid for, or if their promises were marketing tricks. This gives you insight into which contract to renew, which to negotiate for better pricing, downgrading or which to remove completely.

Cut down on vendor risks

A comprehensive onboarding process will reveal short and long term security risks, and compliance with your company requirement. All in one place.

What data access does each app require, and who in your organization will be working with this data? Does the vendor have the infrastructure to securely store and transfer your business data, do your employees understand SaaS security best practices?

More effective long term vendor onboarding

A set vendor onboarding process makes it easy to get new tools into your SaaS stack. You already know what to look out for when searching for vendors, how to track performance, security details, price, negotiation, provisioning, renewal or termination.

This makes the entire onboarding system a breeze for the long term

Better administrative work

A well-executed vendor management workflow increases administrative efficiency, contract tracking, and performance. It also reduces manpower and all the resources that would have been lost.

Better contract management

The key to effective decision making, time and money-saving is a proper vendor onboarding, roll out and continuation process.

This provides visibility into the status of your contract for each vendor, the necessary documents and certifications, etc.

Automate Your Workflows

Your company will waste a lot of time and money on SaaS tools if a proper process is not put in place.

A SaaS management system eliminates the hard work from your vendor management process.

In cases where renewals are automatic, a lack of reactive response to contract renewal will lead to the renewal of SaaS licenses that your business no longer wants. On the other hand, if renewal is manual, you may experience downtime if you fail to renew your subscription before the expiry date.

An automated vendor management system also makes procurement and finance reactive with subscription renewal through reminders.

This helps you prepare for a negotiation, know which vendor contract to renew, to downgrade or terminate before renewal.