About vendor renewals and terminations

In this post we’ll be discussing the second half of the vendor management cycle.

Renewals

When it comes time to renew a tool, it’s a moment to take stock of the vendor relationship and make some key decisions about the future: do you still need this vendor? Is the tool still addressing the problems that led us to adopt it? Do those problems still exist without it? Has anything changed regarding security and compliance over the last year? You may also want to take this time to review alternative vendors and renegotiate as a best practice for procurement. All of this information feeds into the decision: will we renew or not?

If we do, then the vendor management process becomes a loop: we run the vendor back through our approval and rollout process being sure to follow each step closely and maintain records.

Terminations

If not, it’s probably time to terminate that vendor. As with every other part of the vendor management cycle, it’s important to be structured about termination. Many people and businesses don’t think about vendor termination in a deliberate way, and that leaves lots of orphaned relationships and leftover company data that might include sensitive information. It’s important to get control of these holes, especially in an age of growing privacy regulations like CCPA, GDPR, etc.

Some important steps include:

• Checking vendor privacy regulations and asking to delete important data
• Making sure that there are no outstanding contractual obligations on either side
• Updating your system of record post-termination to reflect changes

Once again, what’s most important is predefining the process of vendor renewals and terminations (and the entire lifecycle!) so it can be easily repeated, and identifying internal process owners.