Vendor Management tricks

Managing existing vendors and demand planning goes hand in hand. The push from the vendor to sell/oversell influences the forecasting calculations and forecast can be overestimated. On the other hand the demand might not vary at all or worse diminish within the course of the forecast.

Pursuing the vendor on creating value to enable increase in demand is imperative. It is kind of a catch 22 situation but as vendor manager the push and pull of forecast and demand and the decoupling point needs to be reached sooner.

If there has been no forecast the demand would come strongly , as it happens when a company starts and during the initial days there is no forecast and is run over demands alone. As the business matures the bench is being organized to give cost benefit and quick response to the customer and meet the demands quicker. The strategy to keep bench needs to be planned out carefully and it is job of demand planner to make the resource adaptable to varying customer needs. The jazzing up of the resource is something best done by senior technical individual who has serious mentoring skills.

Tomorrow I will write more on mentoring skills