Continued from the last blog.
- Automate Vendor Score Measurement
ServiceNow automatically gather performance data from across the platform: SLA records, survey results, Service Availability, etc.
Performance Analytics applies your scoring model, calculates the overall score, and generates a scorecard for each vendor. You can drill down into KPIs, track trends over time, and even spot early warning signs when a vendor starts slipping. This makes performance reviews real-time and unbiased. This allows vendor managers to take informed and data driven decision on the vendor performance.
What you need to ensure is that the KPI associated with a KPI group is valid and has the required breakdown. The most important thing is that vendor management-related OOB scheduled jobs are running on periodic basis and are able to fetch data to produce a vendor score.
You may want to fine-tune historic data collection in the beginnin,g in case where ServiceNow platform was already live and has enough information already related to SLA, incident, CSAT etc.
Here is the snippet of OOB jobs present to effectively collect data and produce vendor score.
- Service Credit and Improvement Initiatives
Once the platform starts producing vendor score, there are two additional things help to improve vendor performance are service credits and improvement initiatives. Both are different ways to ensure that vendor performance is not affected and able to course correct in due time.
Service credit can be issued by vendor managers to a specific vendor from the vendor details page. This could be a quarterly review process to evaluate vendor scores and decide on raising service credits against the vendor in case of non-compliance, or it can be automated, as in the case of a specific instance, for example, an incident SLA breach can be automated to raise service credits against the vendor. This is something that needs discussion with business/service owners and vendor managers to decide onthe right approach.
Similar improvement initiatives are structured activities designed to address gaps in vendor performance and drive long-term enhancements. They provide a formal mechanism to move beyond simply identifying performance issues (non-commercial impacting) and instead focus on remediation, collaboration, and continuous value delivery.
Improvement initiative helps to map the initiative to a specific business service/service offering provided by the vendor, and you can also define the success criteria for successful completion of the improvement initiative.
As a vendor manager or vendor admin, these are the critical things to consider before implementing vendor performance in ServiceNow to not just centralize all vendors in one place but to effectively evaluate each vendor in order to improve service quality.
