No business should have to feel they are “on the watch” for changes in their contracts and agreements.  This includes those special “1-year promos” that are deigned to take advantage of companies who get complacent and don’t audit their billing. So instead, the price rolls to the current market retail prices which is usually DOUBLE the promo rate!  Now the service provider should INFORM their customer more clearly of any changes going into effect, clearly state them and offer cost saving OPTIONS?Well, I think we can agree that this is is NEVER going to happen!

Example from frustrated Corporation Manager:

“They didn’t put us on any plan after the expiration, but after I contacted them they supposedly put us back on it and told me to only pay what we were paying prior. It was a big fiasco and has been. I was not under the impression it was only a year thing, but I will contact them and my director to see how they want to proceed if we want to stay or go with another company.”

“I did speak with them and it has taken 5 phone calls over the course of 6 months several disconnection notices that they claimed to me they were going to adjust our account. Again just the other day we received another disconnect notice and I called them on Friday and apparently they only issued us an adjustment from December forward for some reason not November when it had started, and they are saying whatever the promotion was parts are not available.” – P.C. Orinda, CA

Let’s be very clear about this:  This treatment is “vendor abuse”. Service providers have had the ability for MANY YEARS to take advantage of their Clients, and most often do. Unfortunately, that means the business has only 2 options:

1. They can have an internal staff spend hours trying to keep up with the renewals, inventory, billing changes, audits, inspections, expired warranties, agreement promos, 3rd party charges and all the other aspects of contracting with vendors.
2. They can entrust these services to a company that provides a fully managed vendor and supplier service which includes; proprietary software, monthly bill auditing, proactive contract management, document management, compliance notifications, increased efficiency, and maximized profits.

 The choice seems pretty darn simple, doesn’t it?

Imagine all the hours FREED up from resources not having to deal with the frustration of vendor management. Having an EXPERT auditor, contract negotiator and accounts manager creating your unique profile including analytics and visibility into all spend. Having the ability to access all documents, contracts, bills, renewals, compliances, and warranties from ONE CENTRAL LOCATION – 24/7.  That is right, even while key vendor management resources are on vacation or away from the office for any reason,  when an important contact, bill or document is needed it is easily accessible by anyone with credentials.

We understand and respect the services the efforts that internal vendor management resources provide.  But sometimes, they simply cannot dive deep into every bill or invoice and provide the most optimized approach to improving your bottom line.  Sometimes, the only way to do that is by working with cost reduction specialists who do it every single day.

Automatic Renewal Clauses (“ARCs”) or AUTORENEWALS can be golden for business. But for all their perks, ARCs are notoriously problematic. They may irritate customers who’ve missed the termination window, trap businesses in undesirable ongoing agreements, and undermine the validity of entire contracts. They act to perpetually renew a contract when no notice has been given to terminate it. So how can a business ensure they manage their autorenewal contracts to avoid termination penalties, increased fees, and being locked into an unwanted contract.

Keys to Managing Auto Renewals, Todd Larsen, CEO

3 Keys to Managing Autorenewal Clauses

ONE.

When you sign a contract set a recurring alert as a reminder to review the agreement. Organizations especially those with multiple locations have numerous contracts and agreements. Managing them ALL can become overwhelming. In most cases after the contract is signed, it is FILED and FORGOTTEN! Therefore, managing every contract and agreement is a must or the organization can easily miss autorenewals costing them thousands.

TWO.

Review the contract portfolio completely periodically. While it is certainly important to negotiate the best bargain for the organization, contract risk management increases IMMEDIATELY AFTER contract execution. Collecting autorenewal contracts with an unspecified duration for analysis can be TRULY illuminating! Questions to ASK …

• What percentage of all contracts are autorenewals or unspecified?
• How long ago was the oldest review?
• What types of contracts are auto-renewed? What departments, divisions, or subsidiaries are producing the most autorenewal contracts?

THREE.

If you chose auto-renewal contracts TAG them appropriately. One of the MOST COMMON MISTAKES made by finance, legal, and contract management departments is to open the spreadsheet of contracts and leave the “expiration date” blank. With a blank entry, it is not clear whether it was forgotten or if an expiration does not exist.

Most organizations have autorenewal contracts in their portfolio. Chances are that no one knows how many, how much money is at stake, and what the consequences are. With the three simple steps above you can help your organization master these challenging agreements.

The LIMITLESS Vendor Management Solution (VMS) Software is: fully managed software, enterprise-based, and generates high-level spend and vendor management metrics. VMS provides a SINGLE SOURCE tool providing transparency and visibility into all vendor management processes, documentation, invoicing, and costs.

Imagine all of your vendors at your fingertips in one FULLY MANAGED software solution. Tracking and managing contract auto-renewals is only one of the features of LIMITLESS VMS.

With a Vendor Management Solution, contract experts can negotiate a fixed rate for a particular service. The contract terms must be met ensuring that both parties are aware of what is expected and any variances will be flagged and the vendor will be held accountable for any charges and changes outside of the agreed terms.

Limitless Technology, LLC has been managing complex indirect spend and vendor documentation since 2006 for some of the largest companies in the USA saving them millions in costs.

Through our Billing Optimization and Vendor Management Solutions proprietary platforms, we utilize technology, processes, expertise, time, and resources to improve our client’s bottom line.

Limitless Technology manages your vendors, so you can manage and grow your business.

For Additional Information Contact us at 407.330.4466

Vendor management is a core competence in successful business. In a competitive marketplace, businesses must look at creative ways to extract more value from providers, while reducing risk and upholding quality.

Simply beating suppliers down on price year after year is not a sustainable strategy!

Limitless Technology, LLC has been managing complex indirect spend and vendor documentation since 2006 for some of the largest companies in the USA saving them millions in costs.

Through our Billing Optimization and Vendor Management Solutions proprietary platforms, we utilize technology, processes, expertise, time, and resources to improve our client’s bottom line.

Limitless Technology manages your vendors, so you can manage and grow your business.

For Additional Information Contact us at 407.330.4466

Those that lead IT teams should harness this urge for savings by identifying experts (internal and external) that can streamline and standardize vendor processes. At the same time, these experts can reduce the costs that leadership seeks while creating a more organized and cost-efficient structure.

Read more to see a system many IT leaders have implemented across industries to help optimize billing and produce costs savings.

Outsourcing vendor management to a third party will also help standardize processes; and consistency helps enable the transparency essential to effective governance. This helps to alleviate flawed data, and costly mistakes.

Our software will not only house every contract, service agreement, warranty or renewal agreement, but we also manage negotiations for better rates and terms saving your business from unnecessary fees and costs while maintaining quality standards. If you have questions regarding how to manage vendor contracts/agreements or would like more information regarding our fully managed vendor management solution contact LIMITLESS at (866) 504-4050.

Important Agreement signed last week. You ask yourself … “Where is that Contract – I know it’s in HERE somewhere I just saw it last week. I know it was filed … Account name or by service? I can’t find it!” Meanwhile, management is still in meeting waiting for the signed Agreement.

How REFERENCEABLE is your CURRENT VENDOR Database? How quickly could you retrieve files, agreements, contracts, vendor contact information or a particular invoice by date or total amount PAID? How can those documents be retrieved “from another location?”

LIMITLESS Vendor Management Solutions is THE Vendor Management Solution Software that brings Superior Spend Analytics and Visibility within a FULLY MANAGED software solution. Contact LIMITLESS for more information.

Typical spend data is not useful to provide business insight and drive informed decision making.

In many large global operations, spend data originates from different people, in different organizations, in different locations, even using different vernacular or languages, and all with different requirements. Further, it is typically coded from a financial perspective.

While General Ledger (GL) and cost center are helpful for the finance organization, they do not provide the views needed to drive procurement decisions. For example, in an accounting system, an item might be classified as a three-year depreciable asset, but not as a laptop computer. This is not the most useful view for purchasing professionals. They need information that is organized—by commodity, by vendor, by business unit, by geography—to show spending patterns. They need to understand how the company purchases, not how the accounting department records expenses.

Once organizations achieve spend visibility by vendor “family” and commodity, the data is sometimes not granular enough to provide business insight and drive informed decision-making. Detailed product information and attributes are trapped inside cryptic line item descriptions and need to be structured and mapped against a more granular commodity structure.

In pursuit of company-wide spend visibility, enterprises are confronted with three key problems

• The data available is poor and ill-suited to driving procurement decisions
• Enriching the quality of the available data has been challenging and costly
• Business dynamics are constantly changing

Why is information quality typically poor?

The first barrier to good information quality is that spend data is dispersed. It is scattered across multiple, disconnected accounting systems (example, Accounts Payable (AP), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), corporate purchasing cards, eProcurement systems, and electronic funds transfers) and detailed product information exists across a variety of formats (example, XML, HTML, PDF, Microsoft®Word, text files, spreadsheets, databases). However, even once the data is aggregated, the second barrier is that the data is often of poor quality: unstructured, incomplete, inaccurate, or not at the right level of detail.

There are multiple drivers:

• Data entry errors.
Spending data is often recorded inconsistently with errors, duplicates, and misspellings, leaving a large amount of unclassified, “other” spend.

• Nomenclature variability.
The usage of language, nomenclature, and terminology varies by different organizations and groups responsible for the data, making it difficult to achieve a consistent view.

• Duplicate vendor codes.
Typically, vendor names are spelled various ways and there is no link between parent corporations and subsidiaries making it difficult to get a picture of total spend with any one vendor. Even in a single AP system, for example, individual suppliers might have more than one unique code assigned to them, making it difficult to compile total spending by supplier.

All of this leads to poor vendor management.

If you have questions about any of our VMS benefits contact us today at 866-504-4050 to learn more about our Vendor Management Solutions.

Having vendors or third-party service providers is a necessary part of your business in order to operate and provide the services and/or products to your customers. How you manage those vendors is up to you and your leadership team, but these 4 Reasons are only a sampling of the many reasons your business should have a vendor management solution in place.

1. Increased Efficiency:

How many vendors do you manage? 10-20-50-70+? If you don’t have a process and program in place to manage a multitude of vendors, how can you possibly keep up with them? Here are some questions to think about related to efficiency in managing your vendors:

• When does their contract renew?
• When does their insurance certificate expire?
• When do you need to conduct an annual due diligence review to assess the risk they pose on your organization?
• Have their services changed that increases or decreases risk?
• Have your services or processes changed that increase or decrease risk?

2. Vendor Visibility

To effectively reduce supplier risks, whether in terms of operations, unforeseen cost implications, or regulatory compliance, you need increased visibility. Vendor management can track your suppliers and provide the data you need to identify supplier risks so you can take the necessary steps to mitigate them, or choose an alternative vendor. You can easily verify supplier information, such as qualifications and certifications, track performance, and even look into the supplier’s financials to get a broader picture of their risk level in order to protect your organization.

3. Reduce Costs

When you have increased visibility, you can see invisible costs that you can then better control in order to save on costs. Additionally, having strong relationships with your suppliers, due to effective procedures and processes with a vendor management solution. VMS can help you to negotiate better rates and have access to discounts and incentives that can increase your profit margin.

4. Risk Management

Vendors provide value in the expertise and experience they offer; however, organizations must still maintain active oversight. It is important to remember that when a vendor performs a service or function, the institution bears ultimate responsibility for compliance. Because varying levels of risk remain with the institution that offers the product or service, a strong vendor risk management program is key to maintaining compliance and avoiding claims of improper service levels to customers.

VMS Software – Vendor Management Solution is a discipline that enables businesses to not only cut costs but also: control expenses, drive service excellence and mitigate risks…while gaining increased visibility and value from their vendors. Through LIMITLESS’s on-line software overall vendor management, as well as – vendor expense management, is accomplished by giving you absolute visibility into your vendors and spend. No matter what the vendor or type of service they provide – companies can have a comprehensive view into their: services, contracts, rates, terms, conditions and spends through this sophisticated web-based solution.

If you have questions about any of our VMS benefits contact us today at 866-504-4050 to learn more about our Vendor Management Solutions.

Contract management or Asset /Inventory Control is the management of contracts made with customers, vendors, partners, or employees. Contract management includes negotiating the terms and conditions in contracts and ensuring compliance with the terms and conditions, as well as documenting and agreeing on any changes or amendments that may arise during its implementation or execution. It can be summarized as the process of efficiently managing contracts and analysis for the purpose of maximizing financial and operational performance and minimizing risk. Contract management is a powerful tool because of the contract insights that can be understood through reporting. A good contract management solution brings tremendous insights on tangible metrics and provides insight that can help you make educated decisions and take beneficial actions.

For companies with extensive equipment, hardware and machinery, contract management through a centralized software is gaining tremendous awareness because it can save businesses as much as 20 percent annually. These savings can be found in the reduction of both contract costs and time efficiencies allowing employees to focus on more strategic projects and responsibilities. The key advantage of a strong contract management strategy is consolidation. For IT teams, this means consolidating all of your machines and warranties into one primary location, where you quickly gain a comprehensive view of your inventory; manage warranty exit dates, additions and removals; and monitor service levels.

Increased regulatory requirements are also driving organizations to address current service contract management practices.

The primary benefits of adding a contract management strategy are as follows:

Reduce Administrative Overhead
With a centralized log of your hardware assets and contracts, time spent sifting through contracts by internal IT teams and management is heavily reduced, in turn giving management the opportunity to allocate resources elsewhere.

Long-Term Discounts
Companies in good standing with vendors can earn additional discounts.

Immediate Cost Savings
By taking unused systems, phone, machines and any other equipment that is no longer being used off of outdated contracts and warranties and placing only active ones on contracts, businesses see an immediate savings on monthly and annual fees, as well as service fees and productivity losses associated with “unused” hardware.

Central Visibility
Know exactly what is happening with your contracts at all times, monitor timely equipment and contractual data and gain an accurate picture of your assets, all via a centralized dashboard.

Direct Vendor Communication
Fully managed software means you have an expert between your company and the vendor, saving time internally and ensuring that communication is efficient and accurate.

The five benefits above clearly show how important proper management of your service contracts will increase efficiencies, improve your relationships with the service provider and drive cost savings throughout your organization. An added benefit is that you now have a greater vision into spending trends which allows you to budget and forecast more accurately for future investments.

Run a more cost-effective and efficient way to manage your service contracts with LIMITLESS Vendor Management Solutions. Our software will not only house every contract, service agreement, warranty or renewal agreement, but we will also manage negotiations for better rates and terms saving your business from unnecessary fees and costs while maintaining quality standards.

If you have questions regarding how to manage vendor contracts/agreements or would like more information regarding our fully managed vendor management solution contact LIMITLESS at (866) 504-4050 or email us at info@limitlesstechnology.com.

Benchmarking is a common business practice and sensible exercise to establish baselines, define best practices, identify improvement opportunities (contract rates and terms) and create a competitive environment within the organization. Integrating benchmarking into your organization can result in valuable data that encourages discussion and creates new ideas to improve processes and practices as well as relationships with providers. In benchmarking the data is what is most important! Documenting rates and terms to further compare and improve is a benefit of benchmarking and a feature of a vendor management solution.

Simply put, benchmarking is a process to discover what is the best standard of performance seen in a specific company, by a particular competitor or by a completely different industry.

Benchmarking is one of a manager’s best tools for determining whether the company is performing particular functions and activities efficiently, whether its costs and rates are in line with those of competitors, and whether its internal activities and business processes need improvement. Benchmarking helps organizations to stay in sync with the market and customer needs. Thus, benchmarking and then taking corrective actions is not simply emulating competitors. Rather it is the process of understanding what top standard is, and making changes within the organization in order to meet & transcend that standard.

A benchmarking strategy can:

• Clearly identify specific areas of opportunity
• Validate assumptions
• Prioritize improvement opportunities
• Set performance expectations
• Monitor company performance
• Manage change using vendor management tools and analytics
• Improve understanding of the real opportunities and their priority
• Minimizes resistance to change and support for action
• Fosters a spirit of enthusiasm to do better than the external benchmark
• Promotes discussion based on data rather than assumptions or emotion

How benchmarketing Increases Sales and Profits

Benchmarking enables managers to determine what the best practice is, to prioritize opportunities for improvement and to enhance performance relative to customer expectations. It also helps managers to understand the most accurate and efficient means of performing an activity, to learn how lower costs are actually achieved, and to take action to improve a company’s cost competitiveness. As a result, benchmarking has been used in many companies as a tool for obtaining a competitive advantage. A company that uses benchmarking to improve its functions, operations, products and services may enjoy increases in sales and profits. These efforts are likely to increase sales due to improved processes, efficiency among departments and improved product quality. Companies that operate more efficiently can drastically lower their expenses.

Benchmarking has several other benefits as well:

Improved Quality: Benchmarking helps organizations to continuously improve the quality of their products & services. Organizations observe the current standard, and then try to surpass that.

Better performance: Benchmarking helps organizations overcome complacency. They continuously strive to improve their performance standards in order to stay relevant in the market.

Cost efficiency: Benchmarking provides organization with valuable data on the last technology, and processes followed in the business environment. These are aimed at increasing productivity while reducing cost. For example, a manufacturing company might learn about a certain machine used by its competitor, which can do the work for five workers. This company might also adopt similar technology to lower its labor cost.

Prioritizing areas of improvement: While organizations understand the importance to develop continuously, they might be unsure at times about where to start the improvement from. Benchmarking helps organizations to identify the areas where the gap between their standard and that of the industry is the largest. This helps organizations to prioritize the areas that they need to work on.

Leveraging strength areas: Benchmarking can also throw light on the areas where the organization is doing much better than what is observed in the market.

If you have questions regarding benchmarking strategies or about any of the other benefits of our Vendor Management Solution  contact LIMITLESS.

Not only are most service agreements written where they can be changed and modified at any time, but notification of the changes is your responsibility to keep track of.

Who is responsible in your organization for keeping track of changes in provider contracts and agreements? The company posts the changes on the web site and include them in your statements.

 “The Revisions are effective upon posting to the Website. Customer will receive notice of the Revisions in the next applicable monthly invoice. Customer shall have thirty (30) calendar days from the invoice notice of such Revisions to provide [provider] with written notice that the Revisions adversely affect Customer’s use of the Service(s).”

Term modifications are very common. How are they affecting you is something that needs to be determined by your vendor and service provider manager? In some cases this could include an increase in fees, taxes, insurance or 3^rd party fees. How are these fees applied and can they be negotiated on your behalf?

Why were the terms changed? What does the increase cover? Are you getting more quality or less and paying additional fees? How does this change specifically affect your businesses bottom line? Is anyone asking these questions on your behalf?

We all know how busy every department in an organization is and in most cases usually spread thin. The resources available to efficiently and consistently review those areas that could be costing you are at times or most often overlooked. As experts in cost reduction we see these situations too often and in most cases Agreement terms will only go back and recover overcharges or disputes for charges covering a 90 day period – not the date from which the error or dispute occurred.

A vendor management solution is the only way to ensure all aspects of your vendors from contracts, to fees, taxes, insurance, rates documents are being managed individually to ensure maximum optimization and ROI.

When you have multiple companies, communities or organizations with a multitude of vendors and suppliers with contacts, compliance terms, agreements, renewals, discounts, government related cost and fees, 3^rd party fees, surcharges, related costs and policies you need an expert in these terms to be analyzing, financially reporting and negotiating contracts on your behalf.

If you have questions regarding how to manage vendor contracts and service agreements and would like more information regarding fully managed vendor management solutions and how to increase your bottom line contact LIMITLESS at (866) 504-4050.