Author: Chris Quick
Website: WSS Development

Recently, my employer decided it needed to solve a problem managing vendor documentation. This is actually a common scenario in my organization, so I decided that it would be worth taking a few minutes to put together a short case study on how the problem was solved for one team.

The Problem

The team is trying to manage and keep vendor history and documentation up-to-date. The new director is attempting to piece together the budget and spending schedule for the current budget cycle, but he is not fully aware of all the various vendors that the institution has conducted business with over the last several years. He also wants to make sure that all contracts are properly updated.

The team has been storing this information in a variety of places. The information you receive actually depends on who you ask and where you look. Much of the current information (last 3 years) is stored in an Outlook PST file that is shared by multiple team members. Some information is stored in a previous employees file share and a lot of historical information is stored in a variety of places on the network (from individual desktops to network shares). This surfaces another problem, who do you contact for the latest information?

Finally, during any given time period the team may process a wide variety of quotes for products and services. Currently, these are received by the team member and either forwarded via email or communicated in a meeting. The quotes are often lost and have to be requested again, resulting in the possibility of a price increase.

Desired Result

The director would like to be able to quickly pull a report for the current month to show when contracts expire. He also would like to know about invoices that have been received by various team members so he can make sure they are charged to the correct internal clients. He would also like help in communicating to his management for cost justifications, price increases and future budgeting needs. Finally, he wants to make sure he can track quotes and insure he’s getting the best price for the product or service.

The team needs to be able to quickly place all of the required documentation in a single location so both historical information and new information is maintained. The team should not be bogged down with a lot of data entry, so it would be nice if common information (like vendor names) could be selected from a drop-down. Also, as quotes are received, these should be placed in a common repository.

The Solution

This problem was solved using SharePoint Custom Lists, Document Libraries and Content Types.

A new custom list was created to manage vendor information. This list simply contains the common information for the vendor such as company name, address, sales contact number/email, support contact number/email, and company web site. Next, a contact list was provided so that individual contacts could be created for each vendor. The company field was changed from a free text field to a lookup field pointing to the vendor’s custom list. This unified the way the team managed contacts and vendors.

The team had already defined the type of documents needing the be organized: Contracts, Invoices and Quotes. The team’s leadership discussed the various information needed for each document. The goal was to surface the data each team leader needed while minimizing the data-entry required by other team members. Once each document type had been defined and the required metadata (columns) decided, new content types and site columns were created. One of these site columns was Vendor and it created a look-up to the custom vendor’s list.

Now that the content-types had been defined, a new document library was created and each content type associted with that library. In the document library, various views were created to allow the team to quickly surface information. Some of the views created were calendar views. This allows the director to view contracts and quotes in a calendar.

Summary

This was a very short exercise for the team that has made huge strides in better organizing vendor information. The impact has been incredible as the team has solved two problems; one they knew about (Vendor Documentation) and one that surfaced because of the original problem (Vendor Contacts). The time to deliver this solution was less than four hours and was created in whole by a site-administrator.

I encourage you to perform a similar exercise with your implementations. Look for simple problems like the one described in the article. Attempt to solve it with your team by identifying simple things you can do to improve the process. Improving even a simple process can add business value to your team immediately. For the team described in this case study, they now communicate more efficienty concerning a process that used to take hours to accomplish!