European Vendor Management Update — Business Impact Still Lags

Despite the growing importance of vendor management to large enterprises in Europe over recent years, fewer than half of the companies with a specialist vendor management team in place that Forrester surveyed said that this group does a very effective job. Even so, a significant group of companies not using a professional vendor management function plan to create one within the next year. Vendor management groups show up most often among the very largest companies, but in many cases they lie outside the IT organization. A typical vendor management group in a large European company will be a small team of 10 or fewer people, well equipped with software tools to support its work, and using mainly functional metrics, not business outcomes, to determine vendor effectiveness. Such groups mostly focus their work on vendors of IT hardware, software, and telecom and network products and services. Some clear practical steps will help vendor management professionals show more valuable impact on the businesses they serve.