Small-sized businesses with an in-house IT department usually spend a considerable amount of time on managing vendors.

It doesn’t matter if it’s for telecommunications infrastructure, the organization’s networks, or even simple items like printers and photocopiers. Managing vendors for them can become a very time-consuming task.

Managed IT services offer a better alternative to vendor management. With their professional help, businesses get to benefit from best vendor management practices.

From expertly negotiating with your list of vendors to effectively lowering the overall costs for IT services, to enhanced strategic technology planning, managed IT services cover it all. Such a service provider employs trained technicians to take care of administration of IT equipment as well as day-to-day management.

Here’s how managed IT services helps maximize vendor responsiveness and minimize downtime related to vendor mismanagement.

Consolidated Vendor Point of Contact

Businesses typically have dozens of vendor partners. Software applications, cloud-based backups, antivirus protection, telecommunications, web hosting, hardware/software upgrades, and maintenance all need their own vendor management.

Don’t think that only large corporations deal with separate vendors for the abovementioned services. Even small business owners hire these vendors. As their business grows, so does the number of third-party stakeholders they partner with. Unfortunately, this can make it confusing to manage vendors. This is especially true if there isn’t a single point of contact for vendor documentation in the company.

With proactive support from expert managed IT services, businesses can have all points of contact consolidated into a single virtual consultant or CIO. Such a single point of contact model not only makes tracking funds allocation for each service easy, but also offers clients crucial insight into vendor performance.

Minimized Vendor-Related Downtime

Clients can benefit from a streamlined vendor management system with the help of managed vendor services. The staff from the managed IT service provider will survey the existing hardware and software as well as warranties, serial numbers, configurations, licenses, registrations, and more to keep them documented.

This allows easy access to clients whenever they need them. Thus clients can have a reduced vendor-related downtime when a product stops working correctly. Having professional managed IT service provider on board also frees up your time, allowing you to focus on administrative tasks.

Expert Vendor Advice

If you want IT experts looking out for your best interests, consider managed IT services. Look for a team that has extensive experience in vendor management for clients from different industries and organizational sizes.

The service provider should be responsible for ensuring that you get a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA), the right solutions for your business needs, and doing all the legwork.

By hiring professionals, you can rest assured that you’ll only receive the best advice on selecting new software/hardware vendors.

Updated IT Industry Knowledge

Consultants from a managed IT service provider will make vendor management a breeze with their up-to-date IT industry knowledge. They’ll be able to successfully cater to your specific, sometimes unique business needs.

Judging by the latest market trends, they can offer clients crucial advice on timely equipment replacement or upgrade. They know precisely which products are most well-received in the field and how to select vendors that offer the right support.

If you’re looking for objective insight, choose vendor-neutral managed IT service providers. This is because they don’t have a stake in the vendor selection process and will recommend a product or solution based on its performance.

Hands-Off Vendors Management

It isn’t always easy to understand precisely what went wrong with a vendor product and how to contact the vendor before it’s too late. You shouldn’t have to worry about how to fix a faulty product—it’s not your job.

Often when many vendors are involved, they put the blame on other vendors, leaving the client to figure out what to do next. Managed IT service providers serve as the liaison between the client and other IT vendors.

With comprehensive managed IT services from a provider like Think Technologies Group, you can easily contact vendors as soon as a product starts to malfunction. Simply drop us an email or call us to explain what the problem is.

Our team of IT professionals will handle it using their vast practical experience and knowledge. This is a viable alternative to navigating the confusing process of communicating with a vendor to get the issue fixed quickly.

Comprehensive Range of Services for SMBs

The best-in-class managed IT service providers provide a range of services to midsized businesses (SMBs), taking a holistic approach to IT management. They aim to assist their customers in smoothly running business operations.

Large-sized organizations have a dedicated team of vendor representatives that’s at their beck and call for product recommendations and answering queries. As soon as a problem arises, they utilize their technical resources to provide support by working directly with in-house IT personnel.

The complex nature of today’s IT environments is one of the reasons why third-party vendor management is a critically important function performed by managed IT service providers.

Unlike such large enterprises, SMBs typically don’t enjoy close relationships with IT vendors. They lack the buying power necessary to have dedicated vendor resources and related perks of large-scale IT purchases.

Vendors have little insight into the business needs of the individual customers of their SMB clients. For them, obtaining optimized vendor support is often a time-consuming task that usually ends in frustration for the client. Managed IT service providers’ staff acts as the first line of support by troubleshooting issues without vendor interference. They’ll likely be familiar with the operational processes of the vendors and be able to provide timely technical assistance to businesses.

Professional Managed IT Solutions

Think Technologies Group is a leading managed IT service provider with years of experience in offering large and small-sized companies efficient vendor management solutions. We also offer virtualization, cloud services, network security services, IT consulting services, and related IT support.

If you’re in or around Hollywood, Ocala, and Gainesville, FL, get in touch with us today.