Businesses now use hundreds of SaaS products for various business operations. Keeping track of all the products and their associated spending can be challenging unless you have a SaaS management system.
They helped businesses get 100% SaaS visibility, manage numerous apps easily, and provide accurate app optimization insights to keep their SaaS stack organized and optimized. But what about the vendors of those applications?
In a digitalized era where businesses have hundreds of different SaaS vendors, managing them will be more difficult. So arises the concept of vendor management systems.
What is a vendor management system?
It is a platform that allows a business to manage all the different aspects of vendors, from RFQ submission, negotiation, and onboarding to offboarding. And while there are a lot of secondary tasks that make vendor management so complex, here are some of the primary ones that every process should ideally cover.
- Vendor selection
- Negotiating with the potential vendor
- Minimizing expenses that lead to better deals
- Operational analysis and tracking
- Vendor-related risk minimization
- Seamless delivery of the service.
The best vendor management system is designed to cover all of the tasks mentioned above and more.
Their primary role is to make the lives of the IT, finance, and procurement teams easier by eliminating the need to manually follow through with a lot of tedious processes that vendor management can fall prey to.
Why SaaS vendor management systems are necessary for businesses?
Businesses have to deal with hundreds of vendors, and maintaining a healthy relationship with each of them is essential. Good vendor relations lead to longer contracts, better discounts, and higher word of mouth.
But doing this manually is not feasible in the long run, hence the need for a SaaS vendor management platform arises.
With a system in place, you can maintain good relations with the vendors, both during and after the work contract. Here are some of the other main benefits of having a SaaS vendor management system in place:
- Better vendor selection: This ensures that the vendors are adept at fulfilling their services and providing a well-lubricated experience to the company.
- Smooth negotiation: Vendor management tools are developed to reduce the hassles of negotiation. With a structured management system, you can negotiate better that yields more impressive results, and help secure better deals.
- Better risk management: The supply chain is often prone to a lot of mishaps. From compliance issues to privacy, wherever data is involved, risks start to accumulate. So companies have now taken it upon themselves to be proactive about it with a VMS.
- More cost savings: By utilizing a VMS, there’s a high chance many unwanted additional SaaS costs can also be lowered, thereby making room for a better and more flexible vendor contract.
- Fast-track onboarding: These systems also ensure that the vendor has a streamlined onboarding process without any hiccups to avoid delays.
- Stronger relationships with suppliers: Like we already mentioned, a good relationship with a vendor is often a by-product of a good & efficient system in place.
- Better consistency and efficient results: When the system is seamless, processes start to become more fluid and convenient. All of this comes from a consistent tool that’s efficient at driving results.
List of vendor management systems to manage SaaS vendors
CloudEagle
CloudEagle is an all-in-one SaaS vendor management system that handles the complete list of tasks mentioned above and much more like SaaS spend management and contract management.
The range of processes that CloudEagle is adept at handling begins with vendor research, choosing a vendor, assisted buying, negotiating the deal, cutting additional costs with pre-negotiated discounts, and mitigating security risks.
CloudEagle has an AI-powered vendor recommendation system that suggests vendors based on the pain points you’re trying to solve. Select the vendor that fits your system and start negotiating.
Assisted buying
Vendor negotiations can be challenging if you don’t have access to the right data. CloudEagle’s vendor research will display all the relevant details related to the vendor, including ratings and reviews from existing users.
You can leverage them to negotiate or leave it to our negotiation experts; our experts will conduct detailed research on your potential vendors, negotiate on your behalf, and secure the best deals.
Procurement workflows
Businesses often overlook vendor relationship management; as vendors are similar to business partners, it is necessary to maintain a healthy relationship with them.
To do that, you need a streamlined procurement process so your team can negotiate with vendors with appropriate data and procure products easily. Use the automated workflows from CloudEagle to create a seamless procurement process.
Using CloudEagle's procurement workflows, you can make data-driven purchase decisions while avoiding frustrating your vendors in the decision-making process.
Renewals
Renewals give you an opportunity to renegotiate with the vendors, but keeping track of renewals can be challenging. This is where CloudEagle can help you out.
CloudEagle will start the renewal workflows 90 days in advance, automatically assign them to the right stakeholder, and keep escalating until they are renewed.
Unlike other platforms that send renewal reminders via email, CloudEagle does it in a unique way by assigning dedicated stakeholders and guiding the user until the renewal is paid.
It is one of the most comprehensive management platforms in this category that allows you to manage the entire vendor lifecycle.
In addition to vendor management, you can,
- Centralize contracts and invoices
- Get complete SaaS visibility.
- Identify duplicate, hidden, and unused licenses
- Provision and deprovision users in a few clicks
- Get real-time insights and reports
- Automated user onboarding and offboarding
- Browser extension and desktop agents for improved visibility.
You don't have to take our word for it. Listed 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 $500 per month. Click here to see the pricing plans.
Productiv
Productiv is a SaaS intelligence platform that helps you optimize spending and drive efficiency and engagement for SaaS tools and vendors. This tool generates accurate app usage by employees, which eases vendor management and streamlines the procurement process.
Productiv 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 renewals. It is also equipped with a security posture feature that allows you to keep a check on any possible shadow IT activity.
Pricing
Schedule a demo to learn more about pricing.
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 that have the highest monthly expenses.
LeanIX also assists you in proactively managing 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.
Vendr
Vendr can be used to manage the end-to-end vendor lifecycle, from requests to workflows to annual maintenance. Companies are busy, and they can’t usually spend the majority of their effort and resources on procuring tools.
Hence, Vendr helps them save crucial time through automated procurement workflows, constant follow-ups, and employee training.
It also provides excellent compliance features that aid you in planning and executing compliance processes reliably, so you can identify irregularities and potential risks faster.
You also get access to the SaaS buying data to understand what companies like yours are purchasing in order to gain an advantage over your competitors by buying the right SaaS faster.
Pricing
The starter plan is priced at $36,000 per year.
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 assists you in reducing unnecessary spending by identifying and reassigning or canceling licenses that are sitting unused across your organization.
Zylo continuously uncovers and tracks all subscriptions and costs that occur due to shadow IT. Not only does this help you benchmark against your peers, but it also leads to much lower costs and better efficiency overall.
Zylo’s procurement-driven approach ensures that working with its procurement team is a smooth experience for all the vendors involved.
Pricing
Request a customized quote.
Quolum
Quolum has a unique interface that helps you visualize all the vendor analytics and insights. You can track apps, be proactive about spending, and go beyond a simple spreadsheet using this intuitive interface.
It offers detailed visualizations of vendors and their services, as well as product descriptions, categories, and websites. So you can securely handle renewal decisions based on consumption numbers and business objectives.
The Quolum contracts dashboard automates reminders as well as summarizes the key terms of the agreement. This removes the hassle of troubling your lawyers for every little thing and allows you to focus on the stuff that matters the most.
By tracking your payments and consumption data, it can also actively see if you are getting an ROI from your products.
Pricing
A free version is available. Contact the team to learn about the pricing plans.
Tyasuite
The vendor management solution in Tyasuite is specifically 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.
The software also helps you with the live tracking of vendor performance based on on-time delivery, rejections, short or excess quantities, etc. The cost-saving features of Tyasuite assist you in setting the price validity and managing vendor-level product pricing.
Pricing
The Startup Plan is priced at $12/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 vendor data and papers up-to-date in order to reduce spending and stay compliant while also developing vendor relationships.
It aims to make vendor management simple by allowing the user to create any number of onboarding forms. You can ensure that all information and documents are collected and subsequently reviewed to identify any changes made to vendor details and reduce the risk of fraud.
Pricing
Contact the team to know the price.
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 that the vendor management system is secure and risk-free.
You can now be alerted to changes to your application ecosystem with Zluri’s real-time notifications. It provides budget optimization insights, data-rich performance reports, and a streamlined contract documentation process.
Zluri also helps you automate employee onboarding and offboarding and gives you purpose-built workflows so that you get an easy-to-use, intuitive UI. It also makes all aspects of vendor administration easier to handle, thanks to its sophisticated automation engine, contextual recommendation, and simple setup.
Pricing
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 as a whole.
It allows you to swiftly register vendors, use multilingual catalogs, and instantly access vendor information, making the selection and onboarding processes centralized and systematic.
By allowing you to rate vendors using key performance metrics like policy compliance and delivery quality, it provides better insights and metrics to make vendor management easy.
The Kissflow vendor management system also enables the vendors to easily update their information 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.
What are the features of an ideal SaaS vendor management software?
Some of the best vendor management tools mentioned above possess functionalities that provide the best vendor-buyer experience.
And the key to all the different systems mentioned above is consistency and streamlined workflows. So let's reiterate the features that an ideal SaaS vendor management software must possess; this will help you select the right vendor system.
Centralized dashboard for managing SaaS vendors
A centralized dashboard provides better visibility across all the different vendors in the stack. Handling all the various vendor-related tasks becomes more manageable by having them all easily accessible under one single roof.
This, in turn, enables improved analytics and insights in the event that you need to conduct some cost restructuring and even get rid of some suppliers who aren't contributing significantly to your growing ROI.
Effective contract management
With effective contract management, negotiation, renewals, and cost control become a cakewalk, as you don’t have to worry about keeping manual track of acute contract details. The streamlined workflows for all of the aforementioned aspects ensure that you can process, manage, and alter all the aspects of your contract accordingly.
Vendor research
With so many vendors on the market, finding the right ones can be challenging. Yet an ideal SaaS vendor management system should help you find the best one according to your use cases and needs.
Every buyer has a different priority, and a system should be able to contemplate the requirements and suggest vendors that match the pain points.
Streamlines procurement process using workflows
Every onboarding process includes a slew of time-consuming paperwork that is inconvenient to handle manually. Thankfully, with the help of workflows, this process can be automated and streamlined.
Requesters can easily raise intake requests using customizable intake forms; the requests will be automatically assigned to the right stakeholders. Once the request is approved, the procurement team can then proceed with the purchase.
There will be complete transparency throughout the entire process.
Assisted Buying
With assisted buying, VMS tends to make the negotiation aspect much smoother. This is done with the help of experts who are trained to analyze, evaluate, and come to a decision that best suits the parties involved.
With good price benchmarking features, a system should also be able to help you buy the best tools accordingly. Judging different competitor costs to arrive at the price that ultimately fits your budget is critical because it keeps the ROI in line and eliminates the need to re-evaluate.
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 2023. Their extensive features help not just the buyers but also the vendors themselves.
In this blog, we went into the basics of what constitutes a good VMS and then provided insight into the ten best vendor management systems present in the market today.
From the importance of a good VMS to its ideal features, this blog should give you a much better perspective on revamping your vendor management process.
However, it is critical that you choose the best vendor management tool on the market that solves all of your problems and then some because you never know what compliance or vendor issues you may face in the future.
Book a demo with CloudEagle and find out how CloudEagle goes above and beyond in facilitating the smoothest practices for your various vendors.
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
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