SLAs and Vendor Performance Management

3 minute read

May 2017

Not all business relationships require a service-level agreement (SLA), but good vendor performance management is necessary to help your organization prove third-party value add. Use a risk-based approach – how much damage can be done to your company if this third-party vendor doesn’t do its job? You want to protect your brand and reputation while ensuring that what needs to be outsourced gets done and gets done properly.

If an SLA is needed, many companies have a library of vendor performance standards (such as website uptime or customer support response time) and metrics to capture performance data against. That allows a repeatable benchmark for gathering needed information. Often a company will start with the vendor’s standards – tell me what you’re going to promise to do. If a particular element to a standard agreement needs to be added or adjusted, it can.

Once a baseline standard is in place, the company needs to develop metrics that can be used to measure performance against the agreement. Employees in the organization closest to the vendor’s performance are usually charged with ongoing measurement.

The biggest issue for most companies is they don’t have an advanced warning system in place when performance is sub-optimal. They can’t see a negative trend or ongoing issue until suddenly there is a serious problem. Using the proper technology lets you know well in advance that there’s an impending event before you get stuck in it. It also helps make this ongoing performance evaluation process more efficient.

Automate Vendor Performance Management and SLA Tracking with ProcessUnity

Depending on your number of third-party relationships, vendor performance management can be unwieldy. The right technology can make sure you contact the correct people at the right time to get the needed data.This is really the impetus of what we do at ProcessUnity – build technology to help your organization ensure that business processes are running effectively and efficiently.

If you’re using a calendar in your email client to remind you to go ask the guy in billing if the bills are going out on time, you’re going to miss a lot. You’re not going to have the needed information, or the ability to make use of it. The right technology sets up a regular solicitation for information and an efficient way to relay that data. It allows people to stop spending time on maintaining the process and actually use the data to respond in a proactive fashion on key performance indicators.

It can also help your relationship with the vendor. You don’t want things to get contentious. You didn’t hire these people just so you can turn around 60 days later and fine them $1000 a day for not doing the job properly. You want to partner with them, help things run smoothly, alert them when you see something going wrong and work with them to rectify the situation.

While it is important to be legally protected, an efficient process that provides ongoing performance management hopefully keeps everyone on track and out of the lawyer’s office. If it gets that far, however, a good SLA combined with the technology that has properly documented performance issues gives the lawyers the information they need to do their jobs and protect your company.

To learn more about Vendor Service Level Agreements, download our 4 Keys to Managing Third-Party Performance ebook.

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About Us

ProcessUnity is a leading provider of cloud-based applications for risk and compliance management. The company’s software as a service (SaaS) platform gives organizations the control to assess, measure, and mitigate risk and to ensure the optimal performance of key business processes. ProcessUnity’s flagship solution, ProcessUnity Vendor Risk Management, protects companies and their brands by reducing risks from third-party vendors and suppliers. ProcessUnity helps customers effectively and efficiently assess and monitor both new and existing vendors – from initial due diligence and onboarding through termination. Headquartered outside of Boston, Massachusetts, ProcessUnity is used by the world’s leading financial service firms and commercial enterprises. For more information, visit www.processunity.com.