Vendor Management

Vendor Management Overview

Vendor management is the process that helps an organization to take necessary measures for controlling cost, reducing risks related to vendors, ensuring service deliverability and generating value from vendors. This includes identifying the suitable vendors, sourcing and pricing negotiation, monitoring the quality of work, evaluating performance and ensuring timely payments for services delivered.

Challenges

• To choose the right vendor, who meets the organizational standards and criteria as per vendor compliance requirements while promising excellent performance.
• Storing and retrieving vendor-related data might prove to be tough, considering the fact of dealing with multiple vendors for multiple projects at the same time.
• The delayed offering of services by vendors would result in project delays and go-live which eventually results in delayed services to the end customer.
• Validating the invoices submitted by vendors for services delivered and ensuring that the payment is always made on time is one of the major issues, especially while dealing with multiple vendors at the same time.

Banking Use-Case

• At one of our client’s location, a vendor management team of 10+ people were occupied with daily tasks of managing & updating data of services offered by the vendor, generating & mailing acknowledgement for invoices received, generating the detailed report as well as summarized reports and mailing it to all stakeholders.
• These reports consist of details of Productivity, Performance & TAT of various vendors based on different products/services offered, Location, Quality of service offered, etc. To maintain the data & generate reports manually is a very tedious task for the team.
• The whole process is complex and crucial from an audit perspective. It requires productive hours of the team to maintain the data & complete the task. Since the data is maintained in excel workbooks it may also lead to discrepancies if not handled properly. Thus, the client’s team proposed automation and chose SheetKraft as the ideal automation partner to make the process optimal, accessible & accurate.

Daily Task:

• Members from the operations team have to source all the required files consisting of details of customer requests from all bank branches daily.
• The files received vary in format since they’re prepared manually & is converted into a standard format as per requirement by the operations team.
• Data checks & validations are applied and reports are generated.
• Simultaneously, data is shared with the vendors & acknowledgement is received in response. The response from vendors is also recorded

Monthly Task:

• Invoice & Billing Process: The recon operations team retrieves the historical excel files. It is then validated with the data submitted by the vendor. Validated data is considered for billing & invoice is prepared and shared with the concerned department. If any discrepancies are found then it is resolved one on one with the vendor via emails & calls.
• Monthly Summary Reports: Monthly data is retrieved and summary reports are prepared based on parameters such as Products/ Services, Location, Type, etc. and criteria such as Volume, TAT, etc. This data is reported to the stakeholders and higher management for vendor performance and product review. Numbers from these reports are analyzed by the Vendor Management Team and considered while renewal of vendor contracts.
• Recon Data: Since the data is submitted manually by the vendor team & stored manually by the operations team there are chances of mismatch/missing data on either side. Checks & Recon are performed every month to answer customer complain/query arrives.
  

Value addition with SheetKraft

Invoice billing process:

• SheetKraft automated the process by taking inputs from the operations team directly on a web portal instead of excel files and generating an error pop-up in case of incorrect input submitted by the user.
• The input data is then stored automatically in the database & is sent to vendors via email.
• The acknowledgements from vendors received on email are read directly by SheetKraft & acknowledgement data is extracted from email and stored in the database automatically.

Review Reports:

• SheetKraft enhanced the vendor management process by directly extracting stored data from the database & structuring it into a summarized format and mailing reports on a daily, weekly, bi-monthly & monthly basis to all stakeholders.
• Summary reports consist of graphical charts for data analytics.
  

End-to-end reconciliation:

• The automated process is designed to extract data from the database daily instead of doing it once a month, validating with vendor data and generating missing/pending reports.
• Alert emails are triggered to the team if any discrepancies are observed while reconciliation of data.

Team Dashboard:

• All the matrix/parameters generated are integrated into a common dashboard so that the senior management and stakeholders can review the vendor productivity and efficiency at the click of a button.