Essential to any service or network strategy and critical to the success of any endeavour is the correct selection of a supplier. The correct supplier can make your strategy more profitable or significantly reduce costs, but an inadequate supplier can create situations that can put the profitability of your organisation at risk.

L1 associates have considerable experience in this area managing the technical supplier selections for many large scale, complex projects and have built many successful relationships with all the leading suppliers to the industry.

We believe that there are four key areas in supplier selection that are essential to a successful process. These are:

Independence In order to discover and define the best possible supplier or product that the market has to offer to support your business requires complete independence.

Requirements capture It is essential that the requirements are gathered and understood. We also support product and service definition production based on real knowledge of technology capabilities and development plans.

Technical understanding The ability to translate product or service requirements into tangible technical requirements is a skill that should not be underestimated, This is especially relevant when a product requires a level of development and is not “off the shelf”

Vendor/supplier management Managing the supplier in order to receive adequate support and information critical to the adjudication. L1 follows clear processes that are designed to protect your organisation, facilitate competitive commercial offers and ensure that the project is addressed by the vendor with the utmost importance.

In summary, our Supplier Selection & Management Services will

• Shorten your procurement cycle time
• Base your RFQ on the latest technologies and best practices
• Realise lower lifecycle costs via TCO methodology
• Prepare a high level or detailed requirements definition
• Develop a process for supplier selection along with a set of guidelines
• Create a supplier selection process which develops a clear correlation between criteria, conformance, and capabilities
• Continuously improve your relationships with preferred suppliers and partners