Our Focus Supplier Management is not just about enforcing the rules of supplier engagement. To ensure seamless quality of IT service to the business, managing cost and risk throughout the entire lifecycle of procurement item is required. How do you recognize and appropriately act upon any underlying risk associated with a supplier or order? How do you optimize the value of your supplier relationships? Business risk is reduced when you know that all terms and conditions with suppliers support the needs of the business and that all suppliers meet their contractual commitments. While this may seem obvious, executing against it is not as easy as it sounds.

• Procurement records have a lack of visibility by supplier role – (e.g. reseller vs. manufacturer).
• Most requisition processes don’t capture or report to downstream systems key lifecycle management information such as SKU number or contract term
• Lack of description standards inhibit the ability to categorize assets for analysis optimal management
• Supplier management metrics and processes are virtually non-existent in most IT organizations
• Minimal documentation exists on contractual and operational best practices

Our Approach Paragon focuses on supplier management outcomes driven by new perspectives and proven best practices. It’s an approach that improves the visibility and management of the supplier (procurement) process with more attention, standardization and categorization. It focuses on the data related to 1) supplier performance cost vs. risk; 2) metrics and; 3) process integrations. Providing this type of attention pays dividends as downstream applications utilize the data, allowing your organization to make better informed decisions. There is more to consider beyond standard legal, SOW, PO and Accounting processes. A data-driven view into supplier agreements and performance can add real value to an organization by providing visibility into spend efficiencies. Paragon goes beyond standard contract management processes, to help you focus in on how and what detail level data is collected to help manage cost and risk in the lifecycle of your procurements.

What You Can Expect Paragon offers tailored workshops to address data quality issues which enables organizations to enhance and optimize processes to mitigate risks. Best practice guidance on, data points to highlight, contract templates, quote templates, renewal templates. Baseline assessment & gap analysis and then a progressive roadmap of steps to take.

The typical initial Supplier Management engagement is 40 hours, spread over 3 weeks. We can limit the time necessary for the workshop because we only ask for targeted necessary information, which results in more time for analysis, recommendation and increased follow up.