Let’s face it, it’s a well known fact that there is serious overspend in IT. Given that global IT spend is surpassing 5 Trillion, and that overspend is generally at least 30% on average, this is a category with over one Trillion in annual, unnecessary, losses, and, let’s be honest, your organization is contributing to this loss as much as your peers unless you are taking multiple initiatives to minimize it. (See: Roughly Half a Trillion Dollars Will Be Wasted on SaaS Spend This Year and up to One Trillion Dollars on IT Services. How Much Will You Waste?)
Moreover, just because you engaged / acquired one of the SaaS spend analyzers and optimizers (that we chronicled in our piece on the Sacred Cows) to optimize your SaaS spend, that doesn’t mean you’ve optimized it. Amalgamating your licences to less platforms, amalgamating the spend to one invoice, and then ensuring all of the licenses are assigned to active employees is a good start, but that still doesn’t mean you are getting your money’s worth. First of all, this only works for commodity software — it doesn’t work for big back-office systems like your ERP or finance platform where you have to negotiate direct with the vendor. Secondly, it doesn’t work for cloud costs. Thirdly, it’s just software costs, not service/support costs. Finally, if the platform isn’t doing what it is supposed to do and the vendor is not supporting you, every dollar you are spending could be wasted. That’s why Vendor performance management in IT Software (Platform) and Service categories is critically important.
That is precisely what VendorScoreIT was founded to do. Allow a SME (or larger) organization to monitor and manage it’s IT vendors on a regular basis through scorecarding-based performance management at a price any organization can afford (with pricing that starts at an amount that can be paid on a P-Card) while also providing that SME (or larger) organization the support to do it right.
Now, you might think that such a solution wouldn’t be needed as there are SXM solutions with scorecarding and good performance management modules, and that’s true, but most of these were designed for large organizations with a six figure price tag to match — which puts these solutions out of reach of SMEs, and especially those that just need to get their IT and strategic suppliers under control. (In other words, while VendorScoreIT was initially designed to help an organization manage its IT vendors, which are typically the most significant unmanaged vendors in many organizations, it is generic enough that it can be used to score any supplier.)
The solution is a scorecard driven solution, where you can define scorecard models by vendor type, primary service, and/or platform offering; break scorecards up into core areas (operations, partnership, innovation, and procurement) and measures by area; associate multiple scorecards with a vendor (based on services and/or platforms you want to score and monitor individually); define scoring intervals (and the solution will automatically initiate scorecard rounds on the interval you define and invite all of the individuals you want to score it); and define who you want to score each individual scorecard (and average the scores across all respondents).
The platform, which allows an organization to define its areas and measures of interest, also allows them to define default service model and platform scorecard templates, and then associate these with the vendors it wants to scores. Vendors can be grouped by type and tier for easier management, and the platform comes with predefined models for SaaS vendors and system integrators to jump start an organization’s vendor management initiatives. (Supporting non-IT vendors is just a matter of defining any additional areas of relevance, and the measures for those areas, in the metadata for the products (which would fall under platforms) and services the vendors offers, defining default scorecards, defining a new vendor type, and associating the relevant product and service scorecard with that vendor.)
The platform makes it super easy to see overall performance by vendor type, vendor, vendor service or platform, for a time-period of your choice (and to output those scorecards to Excel) — offering simple drill down / drill up functionality scorecards to allow a user to quickly identify where a supplier is doing well, where it’s not doing well, and how it’s doing with respect to its peers. It’s also super easy to pull up the comments associated with a measure that you drill in on, which can give you insight into why a score is high or low.
Right now, it doesn’t have any integrations with third party data sources (for risk, environmental, financial stability, up-time metrics, etc.), but an Open API is coming that will allow you to integrate some metrics with ease, or initiative management (when you decide you need to take action on a supplier who is underperforming in a critical area), but that is currently being designed and will materialize at some point (and most organizations already have a project management platform they prefer to use).
But the platform does come with a considerable amount of expert advice and support to jump-start your initiative, from experts with almost two decades of vendor management experience (especially in IT), depending on what service level you buy. With the
- Professional Plan: in addition to customized scorecards, you get guided performance reviews and quarterly strategic sessions
- Premium Plan: in addition to everything in the professional plan, you get a customized vendor management framework, monthly strategy sessions and targetted strategic vendor consulting
However, it has the collaborative scorecarding many SMEs are missing in their platforms and, more importantly, has it at a very affordable price-point, with premium service options available where one of their experts will help you with initial scorecard creation, vendor assignment, performance review training, and even regular strategy sessions and supplier performance management training. VendorScoreIT is all about making vendor performance management accessible and affordable for all organizations in a package that anyone can use, and get going with quickly. If this sounds like something you could use, you should check it out.