This guest blog is by ELGL member Chris Van Beke, the cofounder and CEO of Vendor Registry.
Effective and efficient public purchasing comes with its inherent costs, so it’s important to avoid the preventable ones when possible. That’s where a good vendor management platform comes in.
With high quality vendor management, bid management and contract management systems, you can control your purchasing processes and data online, and ultimately reduce or even eliminate these hidden costs.
To better understand some of the hidden expenses you might encounter, consider the following.
- How often do you find yourself thinking or hear your colleague asking, “What else did I accomplish today?” Doing purchasing well takes time and focus, and fielding constant vendor emails and calls takes time away from other pressing matters.
- Staff distractions, which consequently detract from other work, can be a costly part of public purchasing done without a vendor management system.
- Higher prices are often the result of fewer vendors competing for a contract. By partnering with a vendor management platform, you create a competitive bidding situation, which can ultimately save your business between 5-30%.
- Enjoy calculating how this savings multiplies over the course of a year, and how you can otherwise spend that money.
- The nightmare of working with uninsured contractors (and the reason why procuring Certificates of Insurance (CoI) from vendors is a hot topic).
- The reality is that getting a COI from hundreds or thousands of vendors – who might be using paper files or clunky spreadsheets – is both time consuming and laborious.
- Vendor management systems can keep track of all documentation and expiration dates centrally, and automatically notify vendors (and you) of CoI that are about to expire.
Want your business or organization to avoid these and other hidden costs? Click here to read this brief but informative white paper from Vendor Registry.