Strategic Vendor Responsibilities

Strategic-Vendor-Responsibilities

Do you feel that your strategic vendor may have lost sight of the principles of ‘partnership working’? Perhaps you feel frustrated or even ‘bullied’ by your vendor into accepting poor service that adversely impacts your business? If so, you are not alone. 73% of strategic vendor agreements run over time, budget or fail outright.

New court rulings ensure vendors must take more responsibility to ensure your objectives are met.

Organisations need effective strategic vendor partnerships that not only maintain, but improve service delivery and achieve significant cost savings. The most common challenges faced by organisations entering into strategic vendor partnerships can be prevented.

This eBook provides key tips on:

  • The 6 steps needed to ensure a successful vendor relationship
  • Why your vendor has a duty to ‘think for you’ and to ‘warn you’ about potential misunderstandings over your requirements – before you sign the contract
  • Top 3 reasons why partnerships fail; how you can avoid failure
  • How to identify if your vendor is responsible for dealing with your problems
  • How using project management frameworks in-house can erode an expert vendor’s responsibilities
  • How the way you manage your vendor can in effect re-write your contract terms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, ALLAN WATTON

Chief Executive of Best Practice Group.

Allan has worked on 500+ strategic partnerships that have required re-alignment and re-shaping. Of these, many have been ‘problematic’ IT projects. With so much at stake, and with so much potential for things to go wrong, It’s unsurprising that many IT projects run into trouble as they change hands internally.

Allan’s worked in the Strategic Service Commissioning, Business Process Outsourcing and Technology fields for nearly 30 years. He is regarded as one of the UK’s foremost authorities on strategic service provider relationships and developing practical contract structures for complex projects and programmes that involve multi-vendor, multi-source relationships.

He has recently advised on a public sector £5.4bn strategic service commissioning arrangement covering over 200 business process services that delivered £15m direct cash savings in its first 12 weeks, and a Section 75 agreement for a £3.5bn local authority/NHS Trust adult social care integration shared service that is anticipated to save £20m per annum.

An experienced service owner and practitioner who has also read contract law, Allan’s experience in understanding how client side delivery behaviours in complex vendor relationships undermine vendor contractual responsibilities, makes him a recognised specialist in advising on the implied (undocumented) contractual obligations of expert vendors.

Chief Executive and Co-Founder, Allan