Leveraging the Workrise Platform to Understand Your Vendor List

For Complex Organizations, It Can Be a Struggle to Keep Track of the Thousands of Vendors They Engage With – Workrise Can Help to Improve Efficiency by Providing One View on All Vendors Used

Many large companies have a lack of visibility on the vast number of vendors they use, which means one department may be struggling to source a particular type of vendor that unbeknownst to them has already been onboarded by another part of the organization. This is a common challenge for operations leaders in the Oil and Gas industry where companies tend to use more vendors than businesses in other sectors. For example, while some large retailers and consumer goods companies may engage with up to 100,000 vendors, some Oil and Gas companies are known to use even more, with one reportedly using 150,000 vendors.^[1] As a result, it’s unsurprising that many oil and gas companies do not have an overview of all the vendors they use given that dozens of contracts may be getting signed daily across multiple business units and geographies.^[2]

Why It’s Important to Make Supply Chains More Transparent

A lack of visibility on vendors poses significant challenges for operations as they work towards driving operational efficiency. Their efforts are often hampered by having to use too many different types of software and other tools to track vendors. There is also anecdotal evidence of super majors’ downstream supply chain teams operating completely independently from the upstream procurement teams. There have been instances of upstream procurement teams negotiating contracts and sourcing products from the same conglomerate separately and therefore missing out on millions of dollars of savings.

For operations leaders, a lack of visibility into spend per project and per well, in particular, makes their jobs more difficult. Experts say one of the best ways of overcoming these challenges is to make the supply chain more transparent, while staying on the look-out for new suppliers and keeping track of current prices each day.^[3]

Getting Better Visibility and Driving Savings 

Partnering with Workrise enables operations leaders to get a better understanding of which vendors they already have access to, and also quickly and easily onboard new vendors. Workrise Connect provides improved visibility on approved vendor lists – this is beneficial for operations leaders at large cap companies if the vendors used are dispersed across regions, departments and categories, which makes it difficult to see who is available. Workrise gives information on availability, the services provided, and the regions covered in one view. 

When using Workrise Connect, operations leaders will have access to hundreds of vendors that have been vetted and screened. They can then filter the vendors by region or category. This drastically reduces the time it takes to source new vendors, which lessens the risk of projects not being started and completed on schedule. Workrise clients are seeing up to a 35% reduction in vendor management costs when compared to their existing in-house processes.

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With Workrise, operations leaders can manage all vendors via a single user-friendly system, which enables them to scale and operate more easily and efficiently.