For any business, it is critical to have employees with the right skills, background, and experience carrying out their duties to operate the business successfully. Human resources departments have comprehensive processes to ensure the right employee for the right job. Businesses spend considerable amounts of money to ensure that the HR department performs well because it is essential to the success of the business.
Vendors are critical to the success of businesses’ IP VPN projects. However, the vendor selection process is not as rigorous as an HR department’s when employing the right in-house individuals. Businesses also do not equally fund the process of selecting vendors to work with on critical projects, even when businesses’ confidential information is at stake.
The following is a list of companies where vendor relationship management is crucial to be successful:
Retail outlets
Semiconductors
Event management
Suppliers, such as a hospital’s supplier for equipment and drugs
In addition, businesses need to manage the vendor relationship when the vendor is from the telecommunications industry; in fact, the telecommunications vendor can impact your relationship with these other vendors. Well-managed relationships with vendors, such as retail and event management, have proven to be very much key to the overall success of a business, and dealing with a telecommunication or VPN service provider vendor is just as crucial.
As you can see, it is important to have a comprehensive checklist for managing your VPN vendor-selection process:
Has the input from a cross-functional team been collected for consideration when selecting a vendor? In the cross-functional teams, include IT staff, accounts, business operations, human resources, sales, and marketing.
Check Request for Information (RFI) responses.
Has the RFI, detailing capabilities of various suppliers, been completed and reviewed?
Check Request for Proposal (RFP) responses.
Has the short list of vendors been completed?
Have the short-list vendors completed the RFP?
If so, has a checklist identifying VPN project requirements been distributed, collecting feedback from the internal parties involved for each vendor who submitted an RFP?
Has the feedback pertinent to each vendor been collected by the cross-functional team who reviewed all submitted RFPs?
Interview the short-list vendors.
The RFP helps identify timetables of the projects, teams if subcontractors are involved, work processes, pricing, and other details. Consult with the cross-functional team to be able to get the necessary information from the vendors, and have the vendors sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA).
Carry out reference checking for the vendors who make the short list, preferably from the reference businesses with similar requirements to your VPN solution.
Add qualitative feedback from internal teams on the RFI and RFP.
With details gathered in RFI and RFP, a comprehensive scope of the IP VPN rollout project that has a clear beginning and end can be built. Thus, no additional scope creep occurs, which can adversely affect time-to-value.
Some additional questions are as follows:
Are strategic partners’ relationships being handled at the senior executive level?
Does the vendor manager report to a line of business serviced by the vendor? In some cases, the vendor may report to a part of the business that is a cost center or a vendor-relationship management team, and not the actual party that is being serviced by the vendor.
Has the set of key performance indicators been identified to measure the vendor’s performance?
Does the vendor have detailed knowledge of the market that the business operates in to respond to business needs?
Does the vendor provide understanding of the totality of engagement across all the buying centers within the business?
Have you developed a joint account plan with VPN solution requirements and a vendor product feature development roadmap?
Does the vendor provide clear insight into its development plans?
Can the business influence the vendor’s operational processes, such as research and development and testing new equipment?
This is not a comprehensive list, but rather an essential checklist to stimulate thinking within the business regarding how to select and work with VPN vendors.