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If you want to stay ahead of competitors in a constantly evolving SaaS industry, you can't compromise on effective coordination with vendors. Dealing with your vendors is not a one-time task; you must continually engage with them to build a relationship.
A streamlined relationship ultimately helps you secure better deals during renewals or upgrades. However, if managing everything from order tracking to contract negotiation becomes overwhelming, consider automation to enhance efficiency.
Fortunately, you can streamline these processes using a vendor management system (VMS). In 2024, the market is flooded with the best vendor management software, each claiming to transform supplier interactions.
Implementing the right VMS provides complete visibility into your vendor and SaaS stack, simplifying vendor management. But how do you choose the right vendor management system?
This article offers insights on selecting the optimal vendor management solution to boost your organization's vendor relationships.
What is a vendor management system?
A vendor management system (VMS) is an advanced platform that enables businesses to manage their relationships with external suppliers, vendors, or contractors.
With these systems, you can streamline vendor management processes, including vendor selection, onboarding, performance evaluation, contract management, and payment processing.
While many secondary tasks make vendor management so complex, here are some primary ones that every process should ideally cover.
- VMS helps find potential vendors based on products, prices, location, and reputation.
- It manages vendor contracts, tracking terms, renewal dates, and compliance requirements.
- VMS tracks vendor performance using metrics and KPIs to assess effectiveness.
- It facilitates communication and collaboration between businesses and vendors through messaging, document sharing, and task assignment.
- The tool generates reports and analytics to help understand vendor performance, costs, and trends for better decision-making.
Why SaaS vendor management systems are necessary for businesses?
Business processes involves many vendors, and maintaining good relationships with each is crucial. However, managing them manually isn't sustainable in the long run. That's why a SaaS vendor management platform is essential.
With this system, you can nurture vendor relationships effectively. Here are some key benefits.
- These systems ensure the vendor has a streamlined onboarding process without hiccups to avoid delays.
- This ensures that the vendors are adept at fulfilling their services and providing a well-lubricated experience to the company.
- With a structured management system, you can negotiate better, yield more impressive results, and help secure better deals.
- Utilizing a supplier management system can lower many additional SaaS costs, allowing for a better and more flexible vendor contract.
List of vendor management systems to manage SaaS vendors
CloudEagle
CloudEagle is an all-in-one SaaS management and procurement software that handles the vendor-related tasks mentioned above, and many more, such as SaaS spend management and contract management.
CloudEagle offers centralized visibility into all vendors, eliminating the need to manage multiple platforms separately. Also, it provides real-time visibility into vendor spending and tracks licenses to ensure compliance.
CloudEagle is one of the comprehensive platforms in the vendor management category. It enables you to manage the entire vendor lifecycle. Within the platform, you will get:
Centralized Dashboard: CloudEagle’s centralized dashboard provides complete visibility across all the vendors in the stack. Having all vendors easily accessible in one place makes handling various vendor-related tasks much easier.
With a unified dashboard, it tracks app usage, helping businesses optimize investments and maximize value. It also enables improved analytics and insights for cost restructuring or removing suppliers that do not significantly contribute to ROI.
Vendor research: With so many vendors on the market, finding the right ones can be challenging. With so many vendors on the market, finding the right ones can be challenging. You don't have to visit Google, Capeterra, or G2 to research vendors; they are embedded within CloudEagle.
Leveraging its vendor recommendation engine, you can find the right vendor based on your pain points. You can also read relevant reviews, compare pricing and features, analyze the ratings, and select the right vendor without leaving the platform.
Assisted buying: Businesses often overlook vendor/supplier relationship management. As vendors are similar to business partners, you must maintain a healthy relationship with them.
If your organization's procurement team lacks the time or bandwidth to handle the procurement negotiation process, the best option is to use CloudEagle’s Assisted Buying service.
CloudEagle’s negotiation experts will conduct detailed research on potential vendors, negotiate on your behalf, and secure the best deals. Leveraging their expertise and price benchmarks, they ensure you purchase the right products at the right price.
Procurement workflows: Using CloudEagle's procurement workflows, you can make data-driven purchase decisions internally to streamline your SaaS procurement process. The tool lets you automatically assign tasks, notify stakeholders via Slack, email, and in-app notifications, and ensure timely approvals using procurement workflows.
You will also get access to "Slack for Procurement," a Slackbot that promotes collaboration and streamlines the entire procurement process. With immediate team connectivity in Slack, communication accelerates, reducing coordination time by up to 25%.
Renewal Management: SaaS renewals are an opportunity to renegotiate with the vendors, but keeping track of renewals can be challenging. But here's the good news: CloudEagle can help you stay ahead of your SaaS renewals.
CloudEagle enables you to automatically generate a renewal calendar based on contract dates, enabling efficient monitoring of upcoming renewals. Renewal workflows initiate 90 days in advance, automatically assign to the appropriate stakeholder, and escalate until completion.
Contract management: CloudEagle consolidates all contracts and their associated data into one centralized location. The tool integrates various internal systems to extract contract information and organize all SaaS contracts and invoices into a centralized dashboard.
Even if your team uses spreadsheets for contract tracking, CloudEagle easily integrates this data and automates the metadata extraction process for quicker data migration.
With CloudEagle’s effective contract management, you can keep track of renewals and use relevant insights to ace your vendor negotiations.
License management: CloudEagle's direct integrations allow you to view purchased licenses for each application and their usage. Underutilization can affect ROI, but with CloudEagle's license reclamation workflows, you can deprovision users for low usage and reclaim those licenses.
With CloudEagle's license harvesting workflows, you can optimize your organization's SaaS license management and ensure that no SaaS licenses are underutilized or wasted.
Get complete SaaS visibility: CloudEagle aids in discovering all SaaS applications, offering over 300 integrations and browser extensions.
By integrating with internal systems and applications through direct API connectors, CloudEagle provides a comprehensive view of your SaaS stack on a single dashboard, including details on apps, spending, vendors, users, and licenses.
Cost Optimization: Integrating the tool with your SaaS ecosystems, you can monitor SaaS app usage, identify active/inactive users, and gather insights like login details and premium license counts.
With this visibility, you can make informed decisions about duplications and redundancies and swiftly take action when needed.
You'll gain complete visibility into your SaaS apps, including their usage, spending, and vendor information. You can analyze instances of underutilization, overutilization, duplications, and more from a single dashboard, enabling you to optimize them and save on your cloud costs.
Onboarding and Offboarding: CloudEagle's automated workflows simplify user provisioning and deprovisioning tasks. With user provisioning, you can efficiently onboard users and grant them instant access to SaaS applications.
These workflows assist your IT team in swiftly providing access to applications, eliminating manual intervention. Additionally, offboarding is simplified, enabling one-click access revocation to uphold security and compliance standards effectively.
Get real-time insights and reports: CloudEagle reports make generating custom reports effortless and convenient. You'll have access to reports related to vendor risk management, SaaS contracts, license renewals, licenses, duplicate apps, unauthorized software, and more.
CloudEagle provides eight types of report categories, including spend visibility, renewal management, budgeting, app visibility, app access, shadow IT, spend optimization, low usage, and over 40+ reports. These reports offer insights and analytics related to optimizing cloud management, streamlining finances, and enhancing resource allocation.
The tool integrates with your SSO and finance systems, providing an eagle’s eye view of your spending data. The reports make it easy for your team to retrieve and attribute all necessary spending information to each department.
You don't have to take our word for it. Listen to this exciting story from Iffi Wahla, the co-founder and CEO of Edge; he recalls how his team streamlined SaaS vendor management using CloudEagle.
Pricing
The starter plan is priced at $2000 per month. Click here to see the pricing plans.
Rating
- G2: 4.7/5
Productiv
Productiv is a SaaS intelligence platform that helps you optimize spending and drive efficiency and engagement for SaaS tools and vendors. It is packed with a comprehensive discovery process that brings all your critical vendor data together in one place.
With this vendor management software, you can utilize trusted insights to procure tools at the best prices and even negotiate SaaS renewals.
With Productiv, you can better handle your relationships with SaaS vendors and make smarter choices about which apps to use. Productiv lets you see the worth of each app so you can manage your spending on SaaS more wisely. It shows you:
- Areas where specific features or teams aren't being used enough.
- How different parts of your organization are working together.
- Which apps are most helpful for collaboration?
- Which apps you don't really need because they're duplicated elsewhere?
- Whether upgrading to a better plan or switching to a cheaper one.
Schedule a demo to learn more about pricing.
Rating
- G2: 4.6/5
LeanIX
LeanIX will assist you in managing the extensive vendor inventory, using features like usage tracking, contract management, and insight generation to maximize ROI. It also eliminates excess spending by identifying vendors and suppliers with the highest monthly expenses.
LeanIX also helps you proactively manage contracts and renewals. It allows you to centralize all vendor contracts to create a single source of truth with drill-down capabilities to understand contract terms, value, and the number of licenses.
In addition to its risk mitigation features, it also discovers and tracks applications in your stack to ensure compliance with GDPR, SOC2, and other regulatory requirements.
Pricing
Contact the team to know the price.
Rating
- G2: 4.7/5
Vendr
Vendr can be used to manage the end-to-end vendor lifecycle, from requests to workflows to annual maintenance. The tool helps businesses optimize their supplier relationships, ensuring maximum value.
It fosters mutual growth and generates value by promoting open communication, transparency, and aligning goals for mutual benefit. Hence, Vendr helps them save crucial time through automated procurement workflows, constant follow-ups, and employee training.
You also get access to SaaS buying data to understand what companies like yours are purchasing. Buying the right SaaS faster can gain an advantage over your competitors.
The starter plan is priced at $3,500 per month.
Rating
- G2: 4.6/5
Zylo
Zylo helps you get visibility into all your SaaS applications and vendors—even those not managed by IT. With frictionless monitoring from Zylo, you can see all your vendors in one place, along with usage, spending, and contract details.
This vendor management platform also includes licensing technology that helps you reduce unnecessary spending. The tool lets you identify and reassign or cancel licenses that are sitting unused across your organization.
Zylo continuously uncovers and tracks all subscriptions and costs related to shadow IT. This not only helps you benchmark against your peers, but it also leads to much lower costs and better overall efficiency.
Request a customized quote.
Rating
- G2: 4.8/5
Tyasuite
Tyasuite's vendor management system is designed to handle vendors or suppliers from any industry. It helps an organization go paperless and onboard vendors through the digital platform.
From simple and digitized vendor onboarding to appropriate RFI and RFQ (Request for Quotation) releases, Tyasuite brings the entire vendor procurement process to the dashboard.
Tyasuite enables cost control through vendor pricing management, quotation management, and simplified bid processes. The tool tracks vendor performance based on metrics like on-time delivery and quantity issues. Also, the ost-saving features include setting price validity and managing vendor-level product pricing.
Pricing
The Startup Plan is priced at $299/month.
Stampli
Stampli’s end-to-end accounts payable platform gives you complete control and visibility over all your corporate spending. This application also includes advanced vendor management, which allows you to maintain up-to-date vendor data and papers to reduce spending and stay compliant while developing vendor relationships.
Stampli's vendor management system makes handling agreements, tracking performance, setting milestones, and monitoring tasks easy. It aims to simplify vendor management by allowing the user to create any number of onboarding forms.
Pricing
Contact the team to know the price.
Rating
- G2: 4.7/5
Zluri
Zluri’s simplified usage monitoring feature assesses your application's efficiency to help you better understand how you can optimize licensing costs.
It has a pre-built database of popular vendor apps and a zero-compromise compliance stance, ensuring the vendor management system is secure and risk-free.
With features like centralized contract repositories, automated vendor access management, and enhanced visibility into the SaaS ecosystem, Zluri empowers IT managers to optimize vendor relationships, reduce costs, and mitigate risks effectively.
Contact the sales team for pricing details.
Kissflow
Kissflow provides a centralized system for purchases, invoice payments, billing information, contracts, and procurement processes. The end-to-end procurement platform bridges the gap between various procurement functions and streamlines purchasing.
From contract management to catalog maintenance, it streamlines the entire process. The Kissflow vendor management system lets vendors update their information easily and get alerts on order and payment details.
This eventually ensures that the important aspects and details of the contract are visible to both the buyer and the supplier.
Pricing
The Small Business Plan starts at $3,600 per year.
Rating
- G2: 4.3/5
Conclusion
Vendor management systems have eliminated the tediousness of tracking, managing, and analyzing suppliers, and more companies are taking them seriously as we head into 2024. Their extensive features help not just the buyers but also the vendors themselves.
In this blog, we discussed the basics of what constitutes a good vendor management system and then provided insight into the ten best vendor management systems on the market today.
This blog explains the importance of a good VMS and its ideal features, giving you a better perspective on revamping your vendor management process.
However, you must choose the best vendor management tool that solves all your problems, including some, because you never know what compliance or vendor issues you may face.
Book a demo with CloudEagle and find out how CloudEagle goes above and beyond to facilitate the smoothest vendor management practices for your various vendors.Assisted Buying service
Frequently asked questions
1. What are the four stages of managing a vendor?
- Assess business goals and procurement needs.
- Analyze, evaluate and select the vendor that best fulfills that need. Then negotiate the contract for the best deal and onboard the vendor.
- Exercise due diligence to make sure that the internal risks are in check and the vendor is compliant with the pre-defined standards while providing the desired service.
- Optimize the processes to ensure everything is working up to the mark and work towards cutting costs while renewals are around the corner.
2. What is the best vendor management system on the market?
While there are many VMS tools on the market, CloudEagle stands out because of its comprehensive SaaS management, procurement, and vendor management features. The platform can help streamline your entire SaaS lifecycle.
3. What are the primary features of a Vendor Management System?
Some of the primary features of a VMS are:
- Application discovery
- Assisted buying
- Streamlined procurement workflows
- Centralized contract management
- Renewal reminders
- Security compliance
