A vendor database is a tool for project managers and coordinators to find the best translation vendor possible for any given project requested by a client. The Vendor Manager’s duty is therefore to manage it strategically to ensure that it is flexible, cost-effective, and maximise its usability. This means the cost of maintaining the vendor database has to be small, vendors have to be used as much as possible, and the variety of vendors has to be flexible enough to cope with extraordinary requests or peaks in the workload.
Tasks such as a full database clean-up or mass on-boarding/removing of vendors takes a lot of Vendor Manager’s time and effort, so they won’t have as much time to be deal with other requests. Hence, an effective management of the database on a daily basis is the most beneficial in terms of cost and employee motivation.
Here are six tips to help you manage your database effectively. Take on board these tips and make your daily work more efficient.
Dealing with Data
The information on the database will be used by other teams, so it should be laid out in a user-friendly manner, and be accessible for the rest of the teams accordingly.
Guidelines should be written on how to deal with the information in the database, for example how to create a new profile on the database, how to update the information on a profile, how to remove a profile, etc. Also, these guidelines can help database users to find the specific information they need: think for example, if you were looking for the QA results of 2018 for a certain vendor, where would that information be stored?
Training sessions should be organised so that employees feel confident and are self-efficient when using the database, or when modifying information in any vendor profile. This process should most definitely be incorporated into the training of new employees.
Profile Duplication
It is quite common for vendors to forget if they worked with you 10 years ago and if their details are still available on your company’s database. In the same way, a change of Vendor Manager means they are not familiar with all the vendors in the database and might on-board a vendor who already has a profile on the company’s database.
Best practice advises that a procedure should be put in place to avoid any duplication of vendor profiles. This varies depending on the software, but as a general rule a unique naming process will help with this by either using numbers or different letters from the name of the vendor, etc.
I would also advise you to check new potential vendors against the records in the database so as to avoid recruiting the same supplier twice.
On-boarding
When deciding if the database is in need of new vendors I would advise you to look at data from the previous year’s workload, and request forecasting details from PMs and Sale Representatives in order to prepare for future requests.
Rule of thumb: a new vendor should be added to the database only when the Vendor Manager is sure they can become a valued partner.
Promotion of New Vendors
For all the strategies and objectives of the vendor management team to be achieved, collaboration with other teams is crucial. Although the database is managed by Vendor Managers, it is a company asset used by different teams. Vendors should therefore be objectively contacted by PMs/PCs, and parameters should be put in place for the different categorisations of the vendors so they are the most effective within their categories. The usage of newly recruited translators is very important in ensuring that the flexibility and quality of the database are maintained.
I read in this article that in order to encourage the PMs/PCs to use new vendors, that this should be stated among their KPIs. It is definitely a good idea to take into consideration as this would help with promoting new vendors.
Removing Vendors
Removing/deleting vendor profiles is always an issue given that the company has invested time and resources in on-boarding those vendors. There should be a process detailing the characteristics that the vendor has to meet in order to be considered to be removed from the database. For example, some factors could be if the vendor hasn’t been used in the last 18 months, if the vendor is too busy to take on your company’s projects and usually declines your offers, or the contact details are out-dated and you can’t reach the vendor at all, etc.
On the other hand, you need to make sure the vendors you want to keep in the database, i.e. the best performers, the cheapest vendors, and those who are always available for your projects.
Having a clear list of both the vendors you want to delete and the ones you want to keep, will give you a clear overview of the database’s status, which in turn will enable you to search for gaps.
I would suggest communicating your decision to the vendors you are about to remove from the database as in some cases this may be beneficial for both parties.
Vendor Availability
Knowing when your vendors are available is crucial in making sure you cover all possible gaps in the database every time a holiday season is approaching. You don’t need to know the working days of the entire database, but you should be aware of gaps on your most requested languages, approved vendor’s holidays, national/religious holidays, etc.
You need to develop an availability tracking system. This can be achieved using an Excel template if a calendar feature on the database software is not available. Some management systems have a section on each profile where vendors or VMs can log their availability, together with national and religious holidays. This saves a large amount of PMs and VMs time when trying to allocate a job in the middle of Christmas!
Are you already using any of these tips? Have you got any other tips you use when managing your database?
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