Managing SaaS Part 6 — Vendor Management

Mitchel Forney
The Startup
Published in
3 min readNov 15, 2018

What if your vendor management platform really brought your organization together in a way it had not before?

SaaS management can bring strong vendor management features, as well as good reasons for other departments to get on the platform. Take a look at the first post in this series for why.

For the company looking for better vendor management or the vendor manager looking for improved visibility, look no further than a modern SaaS management platform.

Why Does SaaS Vendor Management Matter?

Vendor management has changed substantially. Whereas vendor managers used to manage every vendor, vendor relationships are more distributed in the age of SaaS.

A modern vendor manager may not handle every relationship, but they may want to know who manages which relationships. That would also put any vendor manager in a position to report on vendor numbers enterprise-wide with fewer responsibilities. And that person would know who to offer help and with which apps.

Details On Vendor Management

Centralize SaaS Vendor Information In One Dashboard, Including Documents And Notes

This is pretty standard fare for any vendor management system, no? But using a SaaS management platform as a vendor management system you could also quickly see who actually uses the vendor, how much, and how often, in addition to old standbys like who handles the relationship, who handles billing, etc.

Create Vendor Scorecards

Likewise, you may have seen similar features in standard vendor management software. However, a modern SaaS management platform can integrate with thousands of SaaS subscriptions, enabling the platform to automatically calculate vendor scoring via the permissions and information access those vendors require. And if there are thousands of vendors in the system, that kind of shortcut can really save time.

Measure User Sentiment Analysis About Apps And Vendors

What if a vendor manager was the person to talk to about who likes which vendors and why? Previously, a vendor manager may have seemed somewhat removed from users. But using a SaaS management platform’s built-in sentiment analysis tool to survey active users can help vendor managers know who likes which vendors, how much, and why.

Tag And Report On Vendors

You can tag vendors with whatever information you choose and use it for reporting. There is so much you can do with this kind of reporting, we made a whole post full of examples.

Interested in discovering what’s inside your cloud app ecosystem? We can do a 10-minute demo and you’ll see how Alpin can work for you. Get started by emailing info@alpin.io.

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