The ITIL foundation certification training framework includes a significant component called supplier management. Suppliers may be involved in the ITIL service lifecycle. Supplier management must be applied starting at the Service Strategy stage and continuing through the Continuous Service Improvement stage. Online ITIL courses explain the importance of supplier management in ITIL services management.
An IT service provider may need to use the services of partners or suppliers depending on the business of an organisation or company. Google offers enterprise services to companies in order for them to offer search functionality within corporate applications. Companies or organizations pay money to receive the services of these suppliers and partners. To facilitate the interaction between suppliers and IT service providers, supplier management is essential. This article will discuss the goals, objectives, as well as the activities of supplier management.
What’s the Goal?
The supplier management process’s main objective is to manage suppliers and their services in order to provide seamless IT services to businesses and to ensure that they are providing value for money. The service level agreements between the business owner and the IT service provider may indicate that the IT provider may need to use services from suppliers or partners.
Let’s say that the IT department of an organization wants to provide information about employees to the human resource department of the company. This service is provided by a search function that allows employees of the human resources department to enter more than three characters in the search box. All matches in the database will be listed in auto suggest mode if they do. Let’s say that the search and autosuggest functionality are provided by a Google Search server, which will be placed in company network. In this instance, the IT Service provider and Google must negotiate service level targets and the fee. The expected search result time, terms and conditions for providing this service, as well as the price, must be established. All of these are negotiated and dealt with in the supplier management process.
The Objectives
Assuring cooperation with the Service Level Management Process
The Supplier Management process closely links with the service level management process. This is because external services provided by suppliers must also meet their service level targets. The Supplier Management process aligns the customer’s business needs through the signing of underpinning contracts between the supplier, and the IT Service Provider. This ensures that the Service Level Requirements are met and Service Level Agreements are followed.
The IT Service Provider must sign off the Service Level Agreements with customers or businesses. If the IT service provider uses the services of suppliers to meet service level targets, these service level targets must be documented in underpinning agreements. This is part supplier management.
Supplier performance management
The supplier management process aims to manage the relationships and supplier performance as a result of the negotiations and agreements with suppliers. Let’s take the previous example. You and Google agreed that the Google search server would return results in less than 100 milliseconds. The autosuggest function, after you have typed the 3rd character, will work. These are the service level targets that Google has set for its service.
