The HT Group is seeking an Executive Advisor to be a salaried consultant for our client as they build out an IT Vendor Management Office.
This position is responsible for overseeing and managing all aspects of a company’s relationships with external vendors, including selecting suppliers, negotiating contracts, monitoring performance, ensuring compliance, and mitigating risks, with the primary goal of optimizing value and minimizing costs while maintaining high service standards across all vendor interactions.
Key Performances
Establish the IT VMO Framework and Operations
Negotiating contracts with suppliers.
Assessing the performance of vendors.
Maintaining sufficient inventory.
Routing supplies to appropriate departments and locations
Ensuring vendor compliance with company standards
Managing vendor billing and disbursements
Hiring and maintaining additional purchasing staff
Identify and Recover Non-IT Owned IT equipment.
Assist with reclamation of funds and securing future funds in the IT budget.
Reduce the out of band IT spend not occurring within the realm of IT
VMO Duties
- Vendor Selection and Sourcing:
Identify potential vendors, assess their capabilities, and select the most suitable suppliers based on quality, price, and delivery timelines.
- Contract Negotiation:
Develop and negotiate contracts with vendors, ensuring favorable terms regarding pricing, service levels, payment terms, and performance metrics.
- Performance Monitoring:
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to track vendor performance against contract obligations and identify areas for improvement.
- Relationship Management:
Build and maintain strong relationships with key vendor contacts to foster collaboration and address issues promptly.
- Compliance Management:
Ensure vendors adhere to company policies, regulatory requirements, and ethical standards.
- Cost Optimization:
Analyze vendor spending and identify opportunities to reduce costs through contract renegotiation, supplier consolidation, or value engineering.
- Organization and Personnel Management:
Define VMO Charter, Smart Statement, Key Objectives, Organization roles and responsibilities, leveraging role cards, personnel management. Establish processes to regularly review and update organization and personnel management.
- Risk Mitigation:
Proactively identify and manage potential risks associated with vendor relationships, including supply chain disruptions and security vulnerabilities.
- Vendor Onboarding and Offboarding:
Develop processes for smoothly onboarding new vendors and managing the termination of contracts with existing vendors.
- Maintain day-to-day Vendor Interactions
Maintain day-to-day Vendor interactions throughout the engagement, capture lessons learned, drive Continuous Improvement and Continuous Delivery
- Reporting and Analysis:
Generate regular reports on vendor performance, cost savings, and key metrics to inform strategic decision-making.
Required Skills and Qualifications:
- Strong analytical and negotiation skills
- Proven experience in procurement and vendor management
- Understanding of contract law and commercial terms
- Excellent communication and people skills to build strong vendor relationships.
- Ability to manage multiple vendors and complex projects simultaneously.
- Proficiency in data analysis and reporting tools
- Knowledge of relevant industry standards and regulations
- Bachelor’s degree in business administration, supply chain management, or a related field
- Processes and Escalations
Create required processes to effectively run and manage VMO.
Required Skills and Qualifications:
- Understand Day In The Life for an Objective, Deliverable, Role, etc.
- Construct Process Flows, Maps, Training Guidelines, Support Materials
- Define Escalation mechanisms, checkpoints, conditions, and resolution pathways.
- Deep dive into priority processes, define process maps, policies, and review cadence.
- Governance and Interaction Model
Instantiate policies and governance in line with operations regulatory bodies. Define and map out Interaction models supporting VMO operations.
Required Skills and Qualifications:
- Create and facilitate efficient internal interaction models between business units, sourcing, finance, contracts, security, and VMO.
- Define governance for internal and external processes.
- Establish and maintain governance for tactical, strategic, and operational reviews including billing management, returns, performance, satisfying enterprise objectives.
- Vendor Performance Management and Reporting
Define criteria for vendor performance assessment to include: (quality, processing time, transformation, cost, productivity & user satisfaction – internal and external.
Required Skills and Qualifications:
- Define criteria for vendor performance assessment to include: (quality, processing time, transformation, cost, and productivity
- Drive customer and user satisfaction – internal and external, CSAT reporting, improvement planning and execution.
- Create vendor performance dashboards, scorecards.
- Establish policy and execute policy to perform regularly scheduled vendor management reviews.
- Tools and Technology
Research, recommend, and implement VMO tools transformation, cost, productivity & user satisfaction – internal and external.
Required Skills and Qualifications:
- Research, recommend, and implement VMO tools supporting transformation, automation, processing, management, and reporting of VMO operations.
- Create and facilitate efficient and accurate tools for internal and external customers.
Position will be hybrid (Tues-Thurs onsite with the occasional Monday or Friday) just south of the river in downtown Austin. Free garage parking.