Vendor Management: Keeping Time Spent Dealing with Vendors Manageable

Vendor Management: Keeping Time Spent Dealing with Vendors Manageable

Let’s face it–you waste countless hours on the phone dealing with vendors for all of your business needs.

Whether it’s a new software solution or hardware component, you’ll have to go through someone to get it, whether it’s a big retailer like Amazon or your local Mom and Pop computer store, but working with your vendors has several unforeseen costs that you might not even know exist.

Imagine that you’re looking to implement a new piece of software into your organization’s infrastructure, but you don’t know what kind of solution you want or need. You start doing some research online, but you would like to talk to a representative from a company first before committing to something that you don’t necessarily want or need. The conversation seems to go well, but then one thing leads to another and you have been on the phone for a long time. You later find out that the solution isn’t the one for your business, which makes this entire conversation a waste of time and a failure in your eyes.

Now let’s say that your organization goes along with the solution and implements something that doesn’t work well with your current setup. You try to get support for this software solution because you want to get the most out of your investment. Now you’re spending even more time on the phone or sending emails and ticket responses to the software provider, trying to get them to understand what exactly you’re going through and how to resolve it.

Imagine having to go through this process for each and every solution you implement. It adds up quickly and can be incredibly wasteful. This is without mentioning that each of your vendors will have varying points of contact, email addresses, and phone numbers, making communication difficult at best–especially in numbers. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a way to manage all of your vendors with a single point of contact?

Vendor management is the ideal way to approach the procurement of new solutions for your organization, as it takes the countless contacts that you have for your business technology needs and consolidates them into a single point of contact. For example, if you’re having issues with a particular solution, or you are interested in implementing another, all you have to do is reach out to your point of contact at WheelHouse IT.

We document every device, software license, and vendor contact on your network so we can work with them effectively. This way, you don’t need to wait on hold or get sent offshore to talk to a level one support person who will ask you to reboot your device for the third time. Instead, you’ll relay your issue or need to one of our technicians who is familiar with your network, and can pull up documentation and notes to aid them in getting things moving faster, without wasting time.

In short, WheelHouse IT’s vendor management service serves as the single point of contact for all of your business’ technology needs. All you have to do is reach out to us at (877) 771-2384.

How Does the Cloud Help Businesses?

How Does the Cloud Help Businesses?

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way that businesses approach operations, which brings about the question of how your organization can utilize it to further your earning potential and operational efficiency. That being said, how does the cloud help businesses?

For businesses that are still not sure about implementing a cloud solution, it’s quite difficult to get around the fact that it is a great asset for just about any company in some way, shape or form.

The cloud can provide countless benefits for your business, but how can you use it? We’ll talk about some of the basic ways that your organization can implement cloud computing, as well as how much value it can offer you in terms of user productivity and efficiency.

Asset Virtualization

Depending on your organization’s specific needs, you can virtualize certain assets for access or storage in the cloud. In this particular case, we want to talk about virtualization software or hardware. When you virtualize anything for the cloud, you can think of it as storing your assets on somebody else’s computer, then accessing them through your own devices. In this sense, you are effectively eliminating the need to install them on every single one of your workstations, as anyone with an account can simply access them through their web browser.

Software solutions that are stored in the cloud are a great way to improve accessibility for your assets. In this case, you’re utilizing virtualization software so that it can be accessed on any device, be it a smartphone or a laptop. Some examples of cloud-based software solutions are email applications like Gmail or Microsoft Office 365. Hardware virtualization is also an option which can allow your business to streamline its network by consolidating it into a hosted server environment.

Data Access and Storage

Data storage is also an important part of cloud functionality, as without cloud storage, you cannot use it for any other functions. Cloud-based data storage allows for higher accessibility of your data on a number of levels, as any connected devices can access this data and open it with whatever native apps are on it. This is particularly useful for when you’re on the road and need access to important information or documents. Cloud-based data storage is also an imperative part of the data backup and disaster recovery process.

What are some ways that your organization could leverage the cloud? Let us know in the comments.