Working with vendors: It’s a matter of trust

Vendor plays a very vital role in the success of deployment of latest technologies/solutions in the organization. In the past decade, RInfra is pioneer in deploying state of the art technologies like SAP-ISU, GIS, SCADA etc in its distribution business. The organization was successful in deploying these solutions because of good vendor partnership. Most of the vendors have worked closely with RInfra in understanding our business problems, our need of automating the business processes to streamline the technology deployment.

Accenture is one such vendor which has closely worked with us for past decade for the deployment of ERP solutions across India. RInfra have taken forward their vendor association for implementation of all IT EPC projects across India.

One of the pain areas for RInfra was providing the print solution to internal customers located at 118 offices distributed geographically across Mumbai. One of our vendors providing print solution took away all our hassles of investing in new printers, maintaining printer AMC, cartridge replacement, maintaining printer uptime etc. by providing rate per click model thus relieving us from investing in capex model and moving towards opex model.

Some of the leading MNC vendors in server manufacturing were interested in just selling their products and never bothered to provide any after sales support to us. Some vendors (Leading ERP solution provider) try to sell subscription based product when the need of the customer is for a perpetual based product. Such misselling leads to great dissatisfaction for the customer as the vendor does not extend their support to the product. Some software OEMs take the AMC contract but do not extend their support for the software upgrade.

These vendors are more focused on achieving their yearly targets than providing any value to our business. They do succeed in making a one-time sale but fail to establish long-term vendor-customer associations. Such relationships make us more cautious and skeptical about their tall claims for their new products/services which ultimately lead to lose/lose situation. The vendor's after-sales service plays a vital role in establishing trust and faith in the vendor.

While bidding for large project like R-APDRP implementation, System Integrator's (SI) are supposed to submit their bids with OEMs. Once the bids are won by the SI the OEM's show rigidity in their pricing which ultimately leads to squeezed profits to the SI. Such large projects have long gestation periods which ultimately make such project financially unviable for the SI.