How much does your business rely on technology to keep your organization running forward? As business technology becomes more complex, it’s becoming increasingly popular for organizations to have their own internal IT departments to manage and maintain it. Yet, small businesses don’t often have the necessary funds for such a feat. How can your company afford quality IT service? You can start by pursuing managed IT solutions from a managed service provider.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of businesses to rethink their spending strategies, and one side-effect from making cuts to your operational budget is having to deal with your vendor representatives more frequently. Today, we’ll talk about how a vendor management service can not only help you manage your supply chain, but also mitigate the headaches caused by aggressive vendor reps.
The small business owner has to do a lot. In fact, the smaller the business, the more he/she has to do. One thing that many small business owners do is make technology decisions. By acting like the organization's CIO or CTO (short for Chief Information Officer or Chief Technology Officer, respectively), the small business owner needs to understand what his/her organization’s technology needs are. Or, he/she needs to outsource that role.
The small business owner wears a lot of different hats. The smaller the business, the more hats he/she has to wear. One hat many small business owners wear is that of CIO or CTO. Short for Chief Information Officer or Chief Technology Officer, respectively, these positions typically make technology decisions for the company they work for.
We’re not overestimating the importance of vendors by stating that they are literally what make your business work. The company that provides your Internet service, or the software you use to track your employees’ workflow, enables you to get work done. Operations would be impeded without the solutions these vendors offer. Of course, not all vendors provide adequate services. We’ll help you weed out the good from the bad.
Vendors can be impossible to deal with, and this problem escalates when you have quite a lot of them. Every service or product your business takes advantage of comes from a vendor, and if you have to work directly with them every time something goes awry, you’re looking at a lot of wasted time and effort. Thankfully, there’s an easier way to work with your vendors, and ironically, it involves not working with them at all--but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s a process you need to go through before you can most efficiently take advantage of vendor management services.
The appeal of a do-it-yourself project is that you’re the one doing the work. With the Do It Yourself (DIY) approach, whatever it is you're working on, you know for sure that it’s getting the attention it deserves. This is why it can be rather unnerving to have someone who you don’t fully know or trust work on your stuff. This is especially the case when it comes to your company’s technology.
A company’s IT infrastructure includes many moving pieces. Managing it all can be a complex venture that alludes the common employee. Yet, resolving IT issues often falls on the lap of your employees, since they’re the ones facing the problems. In situations like this, it would be best if your staff could simply resolve these issues with just one simple phone call.
Now, you’re probably already familiar with the many managed IT services offered by PCSOFT, and how we’re just a phone call away to resolve many of your IT issues. Or, how with several IT scenarios, we catch the issue before it turns into a problem and resolve it for you so that you don’t have to even be bothered by it. However, despite the fact that we offer our clients several useful IT services, there might still be some technology-related issues that we don’t directly cover under your current agreement.
Regarding technology issues like these that lie outside the scope of our service contract, organizations can’t reasonably expect every one of their employees to know exactly what technology problems we cover and which ones we don’t. Instead, your staff would benefit from having one phone number to call for any and every technology problem, which is where PCSOFT’s vendor management service comes into play.
Essentially, this is an IT service where we become the single point of contact for all of your company’s technology needs. It’s designed to make things easier for businesses by streamlining the way IT issues are handled and resolved. If you’re unsure if PCSOFT’s vendor management service is right for you, then consider all the different technologies you have in your office, along with all the different vendors associated with each piece of equipment.
For example, your printers, your Internet connection, or your line-of-business applications, would each require its own trained technician to resolve an unexpected issue. That’s three different phone numbers, three different accounts, and three different bills to pay. How nice would it be to only deal with one company for all of your technology dealings? This is yet another way that PCSOFT makes technology work for you, instead of you working for your technology.
As a bonus, when PCSOFT arranges a vendor for a fix, you can be sure that it’s a quality service provider and not some fly-by-night break-fix company that’s going to overcharge you. In fact, the vendors that we select to work on your IT equipment are companies that we know, trust, and work with on a regular basis. Therefore, you stand to gain from these deep working relationships that we have with technology companies. This is a much better arrangement than having to select a random company that you’re unfamiliar with.
At the end of the day, streamlining your technology issues down a single point of contact might get you thinking about other ways that you can do the same with your company’s operations. For virtually every task out there, you can bet there’s a technological solution available that will make it easier. If there is, PCSOFT can find it for you and provide it for you, or at least hook you up with someone else that can. For all of your company’s technology needs, there’s only one phone number you need to remember: 02 98730080.
Managing your vendors can be big trouble for a small business. While your organization’s productivity depends on their products and services, dealing with vendors is often an exhausting task that eats up a significant amount of time. By outsourcing this responsibility to a vendor management service, you can handle vendors much more efficiently.
PCSOFT wants to help businesses like yours achieve what we call a "single point of contact," where you have an external party handle all of your technology vendors for you. This is called vendor management, and is one of PCSOFT's valuable services. We want to help your organization reap the benefits of a single point of contact, and in doing so, you will benefit from avoiding these three holdups associated with vendor management.
The Threat of Acquisition
The vendors which you purchase your mission-critical software and hardware through are businesses just like yours. Therefore, it's reasonable to say that they are subject to the same risk of acquisition as you are. If your vendors are acquired by a larger company, it can complicate your relationship with them. By outsourcing the responsibility of vendor management, your single point of contact would be PCSOFT. We would handle any dealings with vendors, allowing you to continue operations as normal, without the fear that your services would suddenly become unavailable.
Having to Repeat Yourself
Discussing your needs with vendors can be time-consuming and exhausting, especially if you have to do so for many different businesses. Rather than explain your circumstances to many different vendors, with vendor management, you only have to explain it once. We'll handle it from there. Dealing with an account manager from your vendor can be frustrating, especially if they rub you the wrong way. In general, it's in your business's best interest to allow an external party to handle the difficulties, which generally makes it much easier to retain a quality relationship with the vendor.
Wasting Time and Resources
In other words, vendor management has the potential to save your organization both time and money by lessening the amount of time you have to deal with vendors. This effectively allows you to spend your workday on more important matters, like optimizing operations and increasing profits. Plus, if you outsource this responsibility to trained technology professionals like PCSOFT's technicians, we can ensure that you get the best product at a price worth bragging about. We know the value of quality technology better than anyone else around, so we'll be sure to use our knowledge for your benefit.
By allowing PCSOFT to represent your business as your vendor management specialist, you'll be saving several hours that could otherwise have been spent on more productive parts of your organization's operations. Give us a call at 02 98730080 for more information about how we can make your technology work for you.
Everyone in your organization has a specific set of mission-critical software titles that they need to fulfill their day-to-day responsibilities, and the business owner is no exception. As an end-user yourself, how often do you worry about your software’s licenses? You wouldn’t believe how many organizations lose time and money due to expired licenses, or fall victim to hackers selling compromised copies of software to unsuspecting folks. What are the consequences of either of these circumstances?
What Are the Consequences of Software Piracy?
Believe it or not, software piracy happens way more often than you might think in the professional environment. This is primarily due to the high up-front costs associated with purchasing mission-critical software. Due to software being a digital product, it can easily be stolen, replicated, or altered, all for hackers to make some money off of someone else’s work. These same hackers might offer their pirated versions of software for discounted prices, and they often try to spread threats through networks with the infected software.
In other words, you don’t have to consciously be aware of the fact that you’re purchasing pirated or stolen copies of the software. While you might know better than to purchase software through an unknown party, do your employees know how dangerous this can be? A study performed by research firm IDC, the National University of Singapore, and Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, states, “pirated software infected with malware was projected to cost enterprises $126.9 billion worldwide in 2014, $22 billion in North America alone.” This means that your employees, thinking only to increase their own productivity, could unintentionally put your budget at risk.
What Happens with Expired Software Licenses?
Some software licenses are extremely sensitive to expiration dates, and immediately become unusable when their time is up. While this might not seem like a big deal, what if this happens in the middle of the workday? Losing access to software like this could be the difference between missing an important deadline on a project and finishing it in a timely manner. In order to ensure maximum productivity and efficiency in the office, you need to ensure that you’re always conscious of when your software licenses must be renewed.
One way you can avoid this is by organizing all of your software licenses so that they need to be renewed either on or around the same date. This makes it much easier to remember to do so, considering you’re only remembering one date rather than several.
Whose Reputation is at Stake?
Naturally, it’s not just your business that has to worry about pirated software. If anything, it’s most detrimental to the software manufacturers. They’re not making money off of pirated copies, and users who are contracting viruses or malware infections might blame the manufacturer for their poor products. Besides this fact, using compromised or stolen software, even unintentionally, has dire consequences. According to CyberTrend, “Many employees in big companies believe that if they steal a program behind a firewall, they may never be found. But many developers have tracking systems that identify who their visitors are and what they’re viewing.” Thus, even if you’re unaware that a program is counterfeit or stolen, you can expect to be held liable for using it.
Reviewing and upgrading your software licenses is something that absolutely has to be done in order to optimize your workplace efficiency; yet, some businesses find it more difficult to accomplish this goal than it should be. Outsourcing this responsibility to PCSOFT can greatly increase your chances of avoiding a software licensing dilemma. Our professional IT technicians can procure software solutions for your organization, and remotely monitor and maintain them to ensure they’re working as intended. Give us a call at 02 98730080 to learn more.