Management Toolkit

Some do's and don'ts for vendor selection

Karen Ann Kidd Tech Republic

Published: 11 Sep 2003 17:30 BST

You just won a hard-fought battle to secure the line item for new systems in your company’s existing network infrastructure. Now you’re about to leap into the fray of competing vendors, all of whom say they are the right one to provide the new systems, integrate them into your network, and provide support down the road. The success of this project -- and how it reflects back on you -- could well depend on choosing the right vendor.

Like any other battle, the struggle over choosing a vendor shouldn’t be entered into without a strategy. George Kondrach, an executive vice president of Innodata, a systems engineering firm whose clients include IBM, McGraw-Hill, and LexisNexis, says he sees a lot of ways that technical executives try to limit the field. Some ways of winnowing down the vendors to the right one are better than others, Kondrach said.

As a vendor representative, Ian Jarman, IBM’s eServer iSeries product marketing manager, said the greatest mistake he sees is "looking at the vendor from the bottom up." For instance, deciding on a vendor based on one criterion, such as the processor speed of the system or systems they offer to provide. This is a very poor practice, Jarman said. "You may be missing the bigger picture," he explained. "You need to know if the vendor can support everything you need in your business."

Kondrach’s list of don’ts includes:

Don’t shop by price: When it comes to vendors, customers often get exactly what they pay for.
Don’t shop for pleasing answers: If a vendor doesn’t see any problems and if a vendor says it will be done smoothly, then run, don’t walk, away. If they aren’t going to communicate problems with you now, they won’t later, Kondrach said.
Don’t go back if they accept "no" right away: These are vendors with "the almost Zen-like acceptance of being told no," Kondrach said. These vendors believe anyone who tells them "no" will realise later how badly they need them and will come crawling back. "It’s the attitude of ‘they’ll be back,’" Kondrach said. Don’t go back, crawling or otherwise.

Jarman and Kondrach’s list of dos for narrowing down the vendors and choosing the right one is much longer, but all the items on this list centre around a best practice, which Jarman described as finding a vendor "with more breadth." If you find the vendor with "breadth," then you’ll have the one who can provide the plan, product, implementation, and support you need to make your project a success. To find a vendor with breadth, Jarman and Kondrach recommend looking for the following qualities: