New Year’s Resolution: Consolidate Vendors

This New Year’s, make a resolution to reduce overhead, simplify logistics, and optimize your workflow: Consolidate vendors. Relying on a multitude of vendors is counterintuitive to efficiency in processes, communication, OPEX, and site-to-site standardization.

Not only might you have separate vendors for various aspects of your operations, you might even have five, ten, or more vendors to support your different lines of hardware. With that many vendors to manage, your lean IT team might not know who to contact when your servers start to fail or even when your contracts are due for renewal.

Resolve to Stop Falling Behind

Without knowing your maintenance contact renewal dates—or vendor contacts—it’s almost impossible to know whether your support has lapsed. Meaning, if your hardware starts failing, your OEM could charge you exorbitant fees to fix it since your previous support contract ended and your equipment is no longer covered. When you have 100+ contracts for hardware across multiple OEMs, it takes time and effort that your lean IT team might not be able to spare to keep up with renewal dates.

With that many IT partners, it’s also likely you have disparate policies and procedures pressed on you from outside experts. When you no longer have enough control to run your own operations, it often takes vendor consolidation to take back your infrastructure from your many solutions partners.

Vendor consolidation can help you regain control of:

• Procurement
• Facilities
• Costs
• Projects

For IT teams that do make the time to manage all of their vendors, the time that should be dedicated to the company’s strategic initiatives is spent combing through support agreements, signing new contracts, and taking on the bulk of the vendor relationships—even when your vendor should be working to make your relationship one that gives you time back instead of adding more logistical burdens.

Resolve to Cut Down Unnecessary Overhead

When you have fewer vendors, managing your IT lifecycle needs, you gain a clearer overview into the current state of your operations. It’s much harder to forget about idling equipment when you have clearer insight.

You’re also better able to scale your resource purchasing, and you can more efficiently assign the right people to the right jobs even during operational fluctuations as you’re not distracted dealing with multiple vendors to get things done.

Streamlining your processes equals more available OPEX. It can also mean more freedom if you turn to a trusted source to handle your support with third-party maintenance (TPM). Switching to TPM not only saves companies 40–70% on support costs, it also enables companies to select and implement the solutions they need without having to add to their vendor list.

Keep Your New Year’s Resolution to Consolidate Vendors with CentricsIT

Managing dozens of vendors for projects across your multiple locations is costly and inefficient. But that’s how most companies approach multi-location IT operations and project management. Eliminating the added cost and hassle of managing disparate IT vendors just makes sense.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution you can get behind—and CentricsIT can help you keep it. As a global IT lifecycle management solutions provider, we partner with your IT team to conduct an assessment to audit your physical operations, meet with your facilities and data center teams to gather internal insight into suggestions, shared frustrations, and troubleshooting recommendations to see first-hand the inefficiencies and pitfalls your teams are experiencing.

Our team of experts will then work with you to identify the essential and non-essential vendors as well as where to distribute operations and support in ways that make the most sense for your company’s goals, priorities, and preferences.

CentricsIT brings over a decade of industry experience and a vast global network of engineers to help you establish protocols and monitoring tools that grant you a more comprehensive overview of your infrastructure. To put it shortly, we help you cut out the clutter.

Let’s start the new year clean. Contact CentricsIT today to get started with vendor consolidation.