Optimatum recommends that employers ask themselves these questions as they seek greater accountability from vendors:

Each year, do you provide your vendors with a thorough briefing of your overarching business objectives for your benefits program? Are your vendors in alignment with your stated objectives? Are they paying you lip service, or is this in writing?
Do your vendor agreements include clear and tight articulation of key performance indicators? Do they reflect fulfillment of specific deliverables, product enhancements and metrics? Are they incentivized to meet certain deliverables?
Are your vendors using scorecards and dashboard analytics that enable you to review success measures across your HR programs and identify future opportunities? Do these tools demonstrate that you are receiving optimal outcomes?
Has your organization spent time focused on issuing requests for proposals to new vendors vs. extracting greater value from your existing vendors? If you work with many vendors, are you looking at the sum of all of your parts? Are there operational efficiencies you might be overlooking?
Has your organization integrated operations across your vendor supply chain where appropriate?

“We believe in holding vendors accountable to your organization’s result, not to their own revenue projections,” the report concluded. “The stakes are too high to ignore the vendor management opportunity in front of us. Ensuring that vendors are aligned with an organization’s business goals and taking measures to enforce greater accountability from these relationships may help mitigate costs and improve outcomes for today’s employers.”

Instant Insights /

Vendor management shows promise in improving benefits results, analysis finds

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