Supplier and Contract Management

Historically, Supplier Management has had a low profile and often wasn’t considered a true discipline in its own right.

For a long time, the operations and development teams would locally manage the key suppliers and their performance. Outsourcing has been a growing trend for 10 years or more now though and the requirement for Supplier Management is far more critical now.  

The Process

Commonly the supplier management process is required to take the commercial contract with a supplier as its base, and define a service level structure in support. This should be formalised in an external SLA or an internal OLA. In either case a set of templates will be required if you are to have any consistency across suppliers and to simplify management going forward.  

The supplier manager must liaise with the supplier and flesh out a workable Service/SLA/OLA, using the contract as the base. The contract should make demanding obligations on the supplier’s part for the provision of supporting performance management information such as:  

• Support Response time - how quickly the supplier responds to an incident.
• Support fix time – how quickly the supplier resolves the incident.
• Availability (of the software or solution.)
• Performance (throughput, response times etc.)
• Percentage Calls Answered (PCA) – how quickly staff answer helpline phones.
• Continual Service Improvement initiatives
• Financial performance (e.g. service credits.)

Supplier Management - People

Unfortunately, training / development programmes designed to grow and nurture supplier management professionals are very limited.

So where do they come from? It could be argued that the Supplier Management role is not sufficiently complex to warrant focussed training and development, but like any IT role, you will only gain the optimum result if the parties involved are suitably experienced and trained.  

iCore can support an organisation in defining the process elements required and in providing supplier management skills to transfer this capability to the client’s own team, or to provide additional bandwidth to the client team during the supplier selection, contract negotiation and transition activities. iCore can also provide interim Supplier Managers for short, medium or the long term.