Managing Vendor Partnerships

Course Information: To be rescheduled Q1/Q2 2012 Please click the button below and fill out the form to be added to the waiting list for Managing Vendor Partnerships. Notify Me

Instructor Ken Emery Kenneth Emery is a sr. facilitator and consultant with Ouellette & Associates. He has been recognized as a highly skilled senior executive with strong strategic planning and change management experience in diverse industries… Learn More About Ken >>

Overview

More and more organizations are outsourcing services to provide them with a competitive advantage. Outsourcing a service is uniquely different than buying a product. With a service the organization’s staff is working directly with the vendor’s staff, and often the vendor is providing direct support to internal business partners and external big “C” customers. Managing the relationship is difficult, time consuming, and often the leadership team is not prepared for this new world.

Prerequisites

None

Intended Audience

All managers and staff who are responsible for managing vendor relationships will find this workshop timely and valuable. It is very effective when a team that is working with the same set of vendors attends together.

Course Outline

Because of increased competition and tightening cost structures, organizations must seek to more effectively utilize key personnel resources and expertise, while leveraging outside services which can provide added value through increased quality, lower costs, improved customer service, or implementation of best practices.

Increasingly managers’ and leaders’ roles are changing from one of selecting and managing employees, to one of selecting and managing vendor relationships. The organization’s employees are also coping with a change in their roles and the relationships with their internal clients.

Along with this change comes the need to break down silos by increasing coordination across organizational boundaries, to share best practices, and to optimize the cost commitments and service expectations with each vendor for maximum value. New oversight and governance structures need to be established specifically to manage this critical relationship.

Ouellette & Associates is helping clients meet these new challenges head on with its newest offering. Managing Vendor Partnerships enables organizations to more effectively work with their service providers and their own staff to create long term value and increased ROI from each of their vendor relationships.

At this workshop you will learn how to:

• Move from contract management to relationship management with your vendors
• Transition from managing employees to managing the relationship
• Understand and differentiate between the goals and objectives of the organization and those of the vendor
• Leverage process management techniques to provide a foundation for managing vendor partnerships
• Utilize change management to transition employees to new roles
• Recognize a range of cultural differences between the organization and the vendor
• Gain additional value from your purchasing department
• Be proactive in shaping a positive relationship and in recognizing when the
  partnership is in trouble
• Establish appropriate governance structures
• Prepare for the end of the contract
• Improve vendor selection, contract development, and negotiation processes
• Create value for long-term competitive advantage