EXPERT SPEAK
Technology heads can also invite vendor suppliers to advise on how to boost the organisation ’ s productivity to reach well defined and challenging improvement metrics .
During the above negotiations , technology heads must continue to evaluate alternative vendors in terms of offerings and price to boost their ability to negotiate with existing vendor suppliers . They must also have completed an exercise of internal rationalisation of major vendor suppliers .
# 2 Reworking vendor relationships
Major vendor suppliers need to be informed about the ongoing internal initiatives being taken by technology heads . Public statements by vendor suppliers can be reviewed on how they plan to support customers in the time of market contraction .
In order to make progress with leading vendor suppliers it is important to have a list of expectations being considered as part of the negotiations . These initiatives could include moving away from annual payments into more frequent periodic payments ; setting maximum payment ceilings for a specified period of time ; extending service contracts to include additional technology infrastructure not covered rather than initiating fresh contracts with new and higher price terms .
They should also highlight longer term business benefits with major vendor suppliers to avoid breakdown in the working relationship of any sort .
# 3 Schedule of payments
To make meaningful changes for the organisation ’ s finance department ,
In order to make progress with leading vendor suppliers it is important to have a list of expectations being considered as part of the negotiations . technology heads must review and reduce the schedule of upcoming payments . To achieve this technology heads can initiate and review a number of activities . This could include moving to the lower slabs of a SaaS subscription ; selecting a product option with fewer features and hence lower slab rate ; initiating consumption-based pricing wherever it has not been selected as yet .
In the area of services , technology heads can reduce service levels or terminate service contracts for older and commoditised product versions ; for other products they can terminate the service contracts with vendors and negotiate lower and more competitive rates with third party service suppliers ; they should initiate DevOps to manage high technology infrastructure costs and usage for IaaS and PaaS .
It is imperative that technology heads and their trusted channel partners work proactively on these measures . It is only with tangible results such as reduced cyclic spending and improved cash flow for the finance department can they ensure that longer term investments in digital transformation initiatives are sustained and maintained . •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS 55