Vendors include companies,
people, and contractors from which your company gets products and
services. They can be either direct manufacturers or resellers. In the
Zoho CRM system typical vendor selection process involves the following
steps:
- Evaluate your business needs and create requirements document (RFI/RFP).
- Collect information about vendors from Trade Magazines, Yellow Pages, Advertisements, referrals, and other channels.
- Send RFI (request for information) to vendors and scrutinize the primary list of vendors based on their response to your RFI.
- Send RFP (request for proposals) to selected list of vendors.
- Evaluate vendors based on the response to your RFP, conduct vendor interviews and short-list the vendors.
- Gather
required information, such as product details, communication channel,
product delivery process and others from the short listed vendors.
- In
Zoho CRM - Vendors module, create vendor information, such as business
address of the vendor, contact information of the persons you are
dealing with, products supplied /to be supplied, purchase orders for the
shipments, activities related to vendors and others. In addition, you
can also attach the important documents related to each vendor.
- Periodically
update the vendors' details and products purchased so that you can have
a better visibility on your vendors/suppliers for the future
procurement.