360° Vendor Management

Week in Review: Scheduling, Forecasting, Requirements, and Inventory

We’ve provided another week of valuable advice to vendor managers everywhere.  Clearly, managing outsourcing vendors is a difficult task made more difficult when vendor managers don’t “get into the weeds” and ensure vendors are effectively managing daily activities and planning future activities accurately.  So, our topics of the week addressed just these types of issues:

•  Inventory Metrics - We discussed the importance of managing vendor quality, timeliness, and the often forgotten inventory and backlogs.
• Requirements Defects - How do effective outsourcing executives manage requirements accuracy and completeness?
• Forecasting  - While most call center operations focus on forecasting accuracy, many backoffice outsourced operations completely ignore this fundamental component of vendor management.
• Scheduling - Often left to the outsourcing vendor, where it may or may not be done well, reviewing scheduling accuracy is a key component of monthly and daily vendor management responsibilities.

We definitely appreciate the feedback we’ve received and we’ll be sure to address your ideas in upcoming articles!  Until then, please keep the ideas flowing and we’ll be sure to provide you perspectives on effective vendor management!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Discipline, Forecasting, Outsourcing, Review, Vendor Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.