This is a series of blogs to cover everything you need to know about vendor management in ServiceNow. Over the next couple of posts, we’ll deep dive into key features of vendor management, planning and approach to start the vendor management for your organization across service management and how you can further scale to other application in ServiceNow with the foundation of vendor management.
This one is dedicated to key benefits, features and relationship between various entities involved in setting up foundation for vendor management.
Vendors play a central role in how services are delivered to your business, whether it’s IT services, infrastructure, facilities, or other business-critical offerings. Without the right visibility, organizations often struggle to hold vendors accountable, ensure compliance with commitments, and measure the real value being delivered.
ServiceNow Vendor Management Workspace (VMW) brings together all the necessary components to manage vendors across the enterprise. Let’s talk about key capabilities offered by Vendor management.
- Centralizing All Vendor Information
One of the biggest challenges in vendor management is scattered information — contracts in emails, SLAs in spreadsheets, service commitments in documents, and vendor contacts stored across different systems. ServiceNow changes this by centralizing everything about your vendors in one unified workspace.
With VMW, you can:
- Store key information about the vendor – vendor type, vendor manager etc.
- Map the vendor to all the service offerings provided by them.
- Centralize the vendor contracts and their key stakeholders in third party contacts.
- Service commitment around availability, SLA or satisfaction which helps in measuring vendor performance.
- Associate vendor assessment and their outcomes in single pane.
This “single source of truth” eliminates silos, improves collaboration across procurement, vendor managers, and business stakeholders, and reduces the risk of missed obligations.
Vendor Management is further expanded to other areas of platform with Third party risk management as well as managing vendor onboarding and their whole lifecycle using S2P operations. Below is a pictorial presentation of key aspects of vendor management and its relationship with other data objects in platform.
Remaining capabilities are discussed in next part.
