Vendor Contacts not visible within Vendor Risk Management module

buckhill2 · ‎08-23-2018

I have activated the VRM module in our test environment for us to evaluate the tool. We currently use the Contract Management module in ServiceNow and have all of our Vendors and their associated contacts entered as part of it. In the Vendor Risk menu on the left there are choices to see All Vendors and Vendor Contacts. The All Vendors works fine and shows everything. But the Vendor Contacts menu produces a blank list. There has to be a setting wrong of something we need to do to enable it to show all contacts in the table. Why does this not work?

Thank you, Jeff

Anushree Randad · ‎08-24-2018

Hi Jeff,

The Vendor Contact table you are referring to is coming from the 'Vendor Performance' application which is used by contract application. And this table doesn't extend sys_user table. So We created a separate 'Vendor Contacts' table for VRM which extends sys_user table so when you create a vendor contact record, it gets added to the sys_user table automatically. Also, when a vendor adds any new contact on vendor portal, it gets added to this vendor contact table. And all the vendor contacts get access to the vendor portal so that they can respond to the assessments. This was a strategic decision made by the product team, so that we stay close to platform capabilities and reuse the sys_user table. We acknowledge that this could be confusing to the users who use both VRM and Vendor Performance/Contract Management and we might plan to make this experience more unified in future releases. Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks,

Anushree

Product Manager - GRC and VRM

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buckhill2 · ‎08-27-2018

Thank you for your reply. Please take a moment and let me indulge in some feedback on this from a daily workflow/operational standpoint. Our company has been slow to adopt all of what ServiceNow has to offer for one reason or the other but that is changing. When I came in five years ago I was given the Contract Management piece of ServiceNow to use to get all of our contracts and Vendors in one place as part of our creation of our Vendor Management Office. We do not do complete Asset Management, but have benefited from having all the info together and documentation scanned in and attached. The Contract Management module has always seemed to be the bastard stepchild of the system in seeking information on it. In training classes I attended or in speaking with technicians from ServiceNow, their knowledge of this module and how it functions was limited to none. I have had to teach myself on this and find out its nuances. I just had a tech from ServiceNow call me the other week to discuss this module as he was trying to learn it and explain to one of his customers more about it. The most I ever learned about it was from a customer of ServiceNow who did a presentation at Knowledge17.

Now, that being said, it seems very short sighted to develop VRM completely siloed from the Contract Management module. I understand the need for external versus internal access rights and roles for security reasons. But from a process efficiency and optimizing the ability of the ServiceNow platform viewpoint this becomes a stumbling block. It may not seem like much to those who focus on the Help-desk functionality or Change Management functionality, but as ServiceNow is trying to be more than an IT focused application new viewpoints need to be taken into account. Contract Management is the next step in managing and mitigating possible risks in a relationship with a third-party.

We are currently evaluating different platforms to handle our VRM function and most of the others are far more focused on the needs of Vendor Managers to include Risk Management in their developing workflows due to our new world marketplace and various risks out there.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you would like to discuss more. I would be interested if ServiceNow would be developing a focus group to help build these functions into the robust functionality they can be. You have done this successfully with the new scoped module for HR functionality.

Thank you,

Jeff Bater

Vendor Manager

jbater@palig.com

New Orleans, LA

Aaron_Braun · ‎12-19-2019

While this is an old thread just wanted to note that the separate class of "Vendor Contact" creates a challenge on using existing user records as Primary Contacts for assessments and questions. How am I supposed to add existing users already associated with the Company/Vendor as Primary Contact? Do I have convert them all to the "Vendor Contact" class first and then select them?

buckhill2 · ‎08-27-2018

Thank you for your reply. Please take a moment and let me indulge in some feedback on this from a daily workflow/operational standpoint. Our company has been slow to adopt all of what ServiceNow has to offer for one reason or the other but that is changing. When I came in five years ago I was given the Contract Management piece of ServiceNow to use to get all of our contracts and Vendors in one place as part of our creation of our Vendor Management Office. We do not do complete Asset Management, but have benefited from having all the info together and documentation scanned in and attached. The Contract Management module has always seemed to be the bastard stepchild of the system in seeking information on it. In training classes I attended or in speaking with technicians from ServiceNow, their knowledge of this module and how it functions was limited to none. I have had to teach myself on this and find out its nuances. I just had a tech from ServiceNow call me the other week to discuss this module as he was trying to learn it and explain to one of his customers more about it. The most I ever learned about it was from a customer of ServiceNow who did a presentation at Knowledge17.

Now, that being said, it seems very short sighted to develop VRM completely siloed from the Contract Management module. I understand the need for external versus internal access rights and roles for security reasons. But from a process efficiency and optimizing the ability of the ServiceNow platform viewpoint this becomes a stumbling block. It may not seem like much to those who focus on the Help-desk functionality or Change Management functionality, but as ServiceNow is trying to be more than an IT focused application new viewpoints need to be taken into account. Contract Management is the next step in managing and mitigating possible risks in a relationship with a third-party.

We are currently evaluating different platforms to handle our VRM function and most of the others are far more focused on the needs of Vendor Managers to include Risk Management in their developing workflows due to our new world marketplace and various risks out there.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you would like to discuss more. I would be interested if ServiceNow would be developing a focus group to help build these functions into the robust functionality they can be. You have done this successfully with the new scoped module for HR functionality.

Thank you,

Jeff Bater

Vendor Manager

jbater@palig.com

New Orleans, LA

Sid36 · ‎07-25-2022

Hi,

We have a scenario where Company A is a Customer as well as a Vendor. An employee of Company A is responsible to create CSM cases on behalf of the Company A and the same employee is also responsible to respond to Tiering Assessment and Risk assessment questionnaires using the VRM portal.

The question is - Where do we have the employees account stored in ServiceNow. Customer Contact table or the Vendor Contact table.

Regards,

Sid

ServiceNow Architect

Ernst and Young NZ