There are many ways of managing your suppliers and contractors effectively– as you’ll probably know from searching online. But just how many of those ‘software solutions’ that you come across will give you full control of your contractors, whilst being efficient and easy to use?

We know that in a business, you need to always be in total control of your contractors and have full visibility of what is going on and how they are doing – while also being efficient. Time is money after all. So we have designed our software, Altius Exigo with your challenges in mind – here are more details on how we can end your supplier and contractor management headaches.

Control

Rather than spending a lot of your time managing your contractors through spreadsheets and questionnaires, let the software do the work. Altius Exigo is a smarter contractor management tool and is able to work more efficiently than the spreadsheets that you’re probably using.

Discover the all-in-one contractor management software >

And should you need to implement any changes due to an alteration in circumstance with your suppliers and contractors, the introduction of these into the Exigo software is simple and in your control. Which is better than searching through lines and lines of data in your spreadsheet – changes would also be visible to your contractors, so you’re always on the same page.

Plus, if at any time, a job with your contractors goes wrong for any reason – it is important that you’re in a position where you can say how and why. With the Exigo software, everything that you do with your contractors is tracked automatically. From this, you can access the status of any supplier or contractor, from any point in time, along with evidence and rationale for decisions made, which will help you should you ever need it.

Efficiency

Managing, assessing and just keeping on top of your contractors, we know can be extremely time-consuming, so why not invest in something that is more efficient if the option is there?

Ask yourself, how much extra time would you have to spend on other tasks that need your attention if you were released from the day-to-day managing of your suppliers and contractors? That is what Exigo Essentials can do for you – the software handles the day-to-day routine so that you can concentrate your efforts where they are needed.

As the Exigo Essentials system is designed and implemented by Altius you will have access to our Altius Eco-System which means that you can benefit from our knowledge and experience with managing problems, should you ever need it.

Transparency

Making any changes to contractor information or requirements from a project, however minimal, can often seem like a nightmare for the person who has the job of communicating these amendments to all parties involved.

Using Exigo Essentials can take away this nightmare by giving you and your contractors a mutual platform for collaboration, ensuring that you both have an understanding of what is required, which helps everyone communicate that they are committed to producing a service that meets expectations. Therefore strengthening your relationships with contractors.

Being able to access accurate information about any of your contractors and real-time reporting is also a feature of Exigo. Being able to view up-to-date supplier and contractor information can highlight any weaker points that may exist and potential issues, allowing you to resolve them before they can turn into a risk to your business.

Altius Exigo

Interested in Exigo Essentials? Sign up today to get a free demo of the tool in action so that you can see first hand, just how much of a difference investing in Exigo Essentials would make to you.

Are you covering the basics of supplier and contractor management? Whether you work with 20 or 200 suppliers/ contractors, finding time to check they’re capable, manage and monitor them on each project takes time that you simply haven’t got.

As a basic standard you should have a robust management system in place to avoid committing one of these nine deadly sins of managing contractors:

1 – Missing contractor and supplier information

As the main starting point of managing contractors, you should have their information and have it available to you within a few clicks. Keep in mind that there’s little use in collecting the same information for every contractor. Depending on their service, depends on the information you will need.

2 – Irregular verification

When was the last time you checked your contractor or suppliers information was updated? You should be checking at least once per year and have access to this anytime to update and retrieve their information.

3 – Not updating your staff on authorised contractors

There’s no point going to the effort of collecting information and verifying contractors and suppliers if your staff don’t know about the new process in place and instead appoint a supplier or contractor not verified. Ensure the message of approving contractors and the new approval process is known and used.

4 – No policy, no rules

Policies and rules set the quality of work you would expect from your contractors. Without these, your company may be tarnished if a project goes wrong. Set out what is expected from the start and make sure your suppliers and contractors adhere to them.

5 – No contracts or specifications

Ever left a project to a contractor only to find it wasn’t finished properly?  Get your requirements down in writing and make sure they understand what you want right from the start. Changes in job requirements should also be followed by a renewed contract.

Discover the all-in-one contractor management software >

6 – No restraint updates

You’ve given your contractor the rules and a contract of work, but did you tell them about that access door or the exposure to heat they will endure undertaking the project? You’re responsible for all restraints and controls that could hinder your contractor’s work, so update them thoroughly.

7 – Don’t monitor behaviour

Just because you’re taking control of your contractors’ capability for your requirements, it shouldn’t lead to them putting less effort into their compliance and performance. But contractors lulled into complacency is a common occurrence, so monitor their behaviour and make sure they know where accountability lies.

8 – Poor auditing (or no auditing at all)

Technology provides a better platform for you to audit your suppliers and contractors over reams of paperwork. Saying that, a spreadsheet that is both huge and complex isn’t the solution either. Using a software, such as Altius Exigo Essentials, gives you the platform to audit better.

Remember deadly sin number one, audit the things that matter to each contractor – a sweeping report just isn’t going to give you the insight you set out to achieve.

9 – No goals to achieve

It’s often said that what doesn’t get measured, just doesn’t get done. Giving your contractors KPIs allows you to gather, measure and analyse statistics to reveal just whether you are getting value for money and the quality of service you wanted.

Don’t fall into the trap

It’s easy to be busy and procrastinate away from managing your suppliers and contractors more effectively and making sure that your compliance process is right for your business.

Spending time now on improving your supplier and contractor relations has been proven to reduce costs, boost efficiency and improve the quality of work. To find out how you can achieve this, and not fall into the trap of these nine deadly sins above, sign up to our free webinar to learn more tips on managing suppliers and contractors.

Supplier assessment and assurance specialist Altius has published a free guide to help facilities managers improve contractor compliance.

The guide outlines the steps facilities managers can take to address common contractor management problems that may present supply chain risk. Such problems include a lack of central supplier information, the complexity of managing supplier lists and difficulty in sourcing good quality new contractors.

Manage suppliers better

Managing supplier lists is one of the critical steps covered in the guide, including creating a central repository of supplier information and encouraging sharing of information to avoid duplication of effort.

The guide also includes advice on how to move towards an evidence based compliance process and transparent decision making process, together with recommended tools to get the job done.

Gary Plant, Managing Director of Altius,said: “Contractor compliance is a critical to the smooth running of your supply chain. It’s important to have a robust strategy and framework in place that sets out exactly what is expected of them and what the timeframe is. This requires policies and rules; contracts and specifications; controls and restraints and continuous monitoring.”

Download your free guide

Discover how you can improve your supply chain and contractor performance by downloading our free Facilities Manager guide Improving Contractor Performance With Compliance. The free Altius guide will highlight key steps you can take to gain optimal contractor compliance, including:

• Identifying and solving your common contractor problems
• Finding a better way to manage your contractor lists
• Choosing the right tools to assess and monitor your contractors

Get your free copy of the Facilities Manager’s Guide today.

Contractors and suppliers provide assets to your business that you couldn’t do without, but along with the products and services that they bring, they could also bring liabilities, problems, or even adverse PR to your business.

Understanding how to approve your contractors or suppliers effectively will become an integral part of running your business, and it all starts with assessing capability:

Assessing capability

This might seem like an obvious place to start, but all too often, even when contractors are asked to do something that they know is outside of their capability, they will attempt to do it because they don’t want to turn down any business.

While sometimes this can work out in your favour, it can be risky and it’s advisable that you have a process in place so that you can effectively assess your possible suppliers. That’s where the following three points come in:

Information

Information is the critical starting point.

Supplier information is needed to establish that a supplier has the capability to provide you with the product or service that you need. This includes checking that they work in the right geographical area, or that they are a large enough business to handle the contract that they are being considered for.

The requirements for the information that you need to gather will vary from business to business, so make sure that you ask questions that are applicable to you and the service that you’re looking for.

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Verification

When suppliers carry an element of risk, it’s often inadequate to take their claims at face value and it is essential, and sometimes a legal requirement to verify that their claims are true.

Any checks that you carry out must be evidence based and carried out by a ‘competent’ person. The checks can include a ‘tick-box’ mentality where you assess the prospective contractors/ suppliers to meet third-party certifications, such as ISO standards and other certifications that a business might need to operate within their industry (it can also include health and safety regulations).

This evidence shouldn’t just be checked once a year either, it should always be live, up to date and easily retrievable.

Authorisation

Once a supplier has demonstrated that they are capable of providing the products and services that you need, it is vital that you let them know exactly what you have authorised them for. If this doesn’t happen, they might agree to carry out tasks outside their verified scope, which could bring unwanted risk into your business.

In time, you’ll have a list full of suppliers that you have approved, so make sure that it is shared across your business. You don’t want any department to stray from this list and appoint any non-approved suppliers, for example, if they’re cheaper on price. In the long run, that decision could be more costly to you.

How can Altius help?

The steps outlined in this blog can be time-consuming, especially if you’re a small business and don’t have a lot of time to put aside for approving suppliers. Nevertheless, ensuring that your suppliers are capable of efficiently carrying out their duties should be high on your priorities – and this is where Altius Exigo can help you.

Altius Exigo Essentials is a solution that was designed to give you complete supplier and contractor management that is flexible and transparent – and it can help you to take care of the steps outlined in this blog. Interested? Sign up to our webinar below and learn how Exigo Essentials can assist you with any supplier/ contractor management problems.

One of the greatest challenges of supplier audits is actually introducing it into your workplace in the first place. Both you and your suppliers understand the importance of such audits to mitigate risk, ensure supply chain integrity and stay within the boundaries of the law.

To ensure your own supplier audit is adding-value to your operations and supply chain from first integration, take into consideration these five steps for better auditing practice:

The right people, the right tools

A strong platform internally is required before even contemplating going out to audit suppliers. This requires you to build a team that you can trust to audit, input data and analyse as effectively as possible.

For those firms operating on a global scale, sourcing local freelancers will save you money on travel costs for your core team, but caution is required to ensure you employ the right auditors for you.

Likewise, having the right tools available to your new team is critical to begin the auditing process. This doesn’t just include your internal supply chain software, but also the templates/questionnaires/audit forms that your team will have to complete for each supplier.

Schedule regular audits

How often you should hold audits depends entirely on the size of your supply chain. 12 months is seen as the most popular timeframe to complete audits – but sticking to your schedule and taking the time out every year to dedicate yourself to the process is hard to do.

It’s inevitable in most organisations that supplier numbers continue to grow year-on-year. This growth, coinciding with your existing and ageing database over time means you’ll be exposed to the most basic changes which could disrupt your daily activities. Supplier names, locations and lead contacts, are just three examples of this situation. To combat this, be firm with yourself and your team to ensure regular audits take place.

Best Practice Guide to Supply Chain Compliance Now Available >

Identical supplier standards

To maximise the benefits of your audit and the standards of your organisation, it is essential to audit your suppliers based on the same aspects – no matter where they are in the world. For organisations with global suppliers, this is more important for you.

As well as having a standardized approach, based on UK industry standards that lead the way in global supply chain management, you should ensure that your people and tools can achieve the same higher standard to meet your expectations.

Can a local freelancer 2,000 miles away carry out the same supply chain check as the rest of the team could? This is just one question to think about when introducing your new supplier audits.

Closed-loop process

Once the auditing process has been completed, now is the time to bring that data together to ensure that consistent results are achieved and reporting can be made to share the results with the relevant stakeholders in your organisation.

Ensuring you have a closed-loop process means that audits in the future become easier over time to complete. Verification of existing suppliers, including changing their basic contact details, can be completed more efficiently internally.

Measure audit success and report

After audits, you should be measuring and reporting the success of the latest one you’ve completed. This allows for you and your team to implement improvements and fine tune your auditing process. Questions to ask yourself at this stage include:

• How many audits were completed on time?
• How long did the average audit report take to turn around?
• How long did it take for corrective action closure?
• How many overdue corrective actions on average did you have?

These measures can greatly enhance your resource planning and management in the future.

Photo credit: Bruce Guenter