Alsbridge Launches Vendor Management Assessment Tool

DALLAS, July 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Alsbridge, Inc., a global sourcing, benchmarking and transformation advisory firm, today announced the availability of a free self-assessment tool to allow enterprise clients to evaluate their vendor management and governance maturity levels.

The new offering is integral to Alsbridge's business strategy of offering a full complement of client services.

"Many large global businesses today struggle to assess their vendor management capabilities and lack a clear sense of where they stand relative to their industry peers," said David England, an Alsbridge Director who designed the offering. "This easy-to-use tool provides a starting point for vendor management teams seeking to identify areas of strength, expose gaps and chart an improvement plan."

Over the past several years, vendor management has become an increasingly high priority. Businesses face growing pressure to oversee complex multi-vendor sourcing models and ensure collaboration and coordination between myriad providers. Another emerging imperative – especially for heavily regulated industries such as financial services – is to maintain transparency into the service delivery and identify potential risks.

"While interest is growing, vendor management remains a relatively immature field," added England.  "Until recently, few enterprise had a dedicated resource. Today, vendor management capabilities continue to vary widely. By providing insight into existing performance, the assessment is designed to help enterprises benchmark their capabilities against industry standards."

The assessment tool comprises six vendor management categories: Contract, Financial, Performance, Relationship, Risk and General Strategy. Each category contains a set of criteria or questions that an assessor ranks using a sliding scale of 1 to 5, ranging from "non-existent" to "moving toward best practices." The Contract category, for example, includes a statement related to issues resolution: "The progress of contract issue resolution is recoded in a standard tracker or system." A total of 80 criteria are included in the assessment.

"In many cases, organizations are strong in certain categories such as Relationship Management, but have significant gaps in other areas such as Risk," said England. "In addition, many vendor management organizations lack a framework to articulate the scope of activity that falls under their purview. And in some cases teams simply don't know what they don't' know. This tool can help place a stake in the ground in terms of understanding where you stand and where you need to go."

"The new self-assessment tool will help our clients address the critical challenges they face in enhancing their vendor management, governance and compliance capabilities," said Jeff Augustin, Alsbridge Managing Director of Outsourcing Advisory Services. "As such, the tool reflects our commitment to addressing our clients' IT and business operational requirements throughout the service delivery lifecycle."

About Alsbridge:

Alsbridge (www.alsbridge.com) is a management consulting firm that helps companies reduce costs and enable their businesses by optimizing the way they work with their vendors. With over 300 consultants on four continents, Alsbridge has been a trusted advisor to over 40% of the Fortune 500 and currently advises over 200 clients a year on over $11B in spend. Experienced consultants apply deep benchmarking databases and market insight to help clients engage the optimal vendors for their situation, negotiate best practice terms at fair market prices and improve the way they govern vendor relationships. Alsbridge clients utilize the most cost effective and value-added global sources for IT infrastructure services, network carrier services, hardware and software, application support and development, business processes and cloud services.

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SOURCE Alsbridge, Inc.

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