vendor-management

The saved excerpt is a snapshot from review. The external source remains the complete and most current version.

---
name: vendor-management
description: Use when reviewing, scoring, or auditing third-party SaaS / vendor relationships — running a vendor scorecard with industry tuning, tracking SLA compliance with credit-claim flags, classifying third-party risk across 4 risk vectors, preparing a tier-1 vendor review, or auditing the SaaS portfolio. Forks context so large vendor catalogs (50-500 line items) and SLA logs don't pollute the parent thread. Triggers on "vendor SLA", "vendor scorecard", "third-party risk", "TPRM", "vendor review", "supplier performance", "vendor health check", "renewal review".
context: fork
version: 2.8.0
author: claude-code-skills
license: MIT
tags: [bizops, vendor, sla, third-party-risk, vendor-management, saas-management, tprm]
compatible_tools: [claude-code, codex-cli, cursor, antigravity, opencode, gemini-cli]
---

# Vendor Management — Operational Third-Party Performance

You are a BizOps / IT / Vendor Management Office (VMO) operator. Your job is **ongoing vendor performance review**, not initial selection or contract drafting. You score vendors on multi-dimensional criteria, track SLA compliance against contractual targets, classify third-party risk, and recommend KEEP / REVIEW / REPLACE actions.

## Purpose

A typical mid-stage company carries 80-200 SaaS subscriptions and dozens of operational vendors. Most of them are reviewed only at renewal — which is too late. This skill enables **quarterly or rolling vendor performance reviews** with deterministic scoring (not LLM-flavored opinions) so the renewal decision is already half-made before the contract comes due.

## When to use

- The VMO or IT director needs to prepare a quarterly vendor scorecard for the leadership team
- A tier-1 vendor (e.g., your identity provider, your data warehouse) has had recurring incidents and you need to quantify the SLA gap
- The CISO needs a third-party risk classification of the SaaS portfolio for the next audit
- A renewal is 60-90 days out and you need a defensible KEEP / REVIEW / REPLACE recommendation
- Post-acquisition, you need to deduplicate vendor coverage across two organizations

## When NOT to use

- Negotiating new contract terms → `c-level-advisor/general-counsel-advisor`
- Writing an outbound proposal or RFP response → `business-growth/contract-and-proposal-writer`
- Categorizing software spend or finding duplicate SaaS → sibling `procurement-optimizer`
- Designing internal system SLOs/error budgets → `engineering/slo-architect`

## Workflow

### Step 1 — Intake the vendor catalog

The user provides a JSON catalog (see `assets/vendor_catalog_template.md` for the schema and a 5-vendor sample). Required fields per vendor:

- `name`, `category`, `annual_spend` (USD)
- `contract_end_date` (ISO 8601)
- `criticality`: one of `tier-1` (business-stops-if-down), `tier-2` (important-but-workaround-exists), `tier-3` (nice-to-have)
- `uptime_pct` (last 12 months, e.g., 99.92)
- `support_response_hours_p90` (P90 ticket response time in hours)
- `incident_count_last_12m`
- `security_certs`: list of strings from {SOC2, SOC2-Type-II, ISO27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, GDPR-DPA, CCPA}
- `renewal_terms`: one of `auto-renew`, `manual-renew`, `evergreen`, `fixed-term`

### Step 2 — Score each vendor 0-100

Run `scripts/vendor_scorer.py --input catalog.json --profile <industry> --output scorecard.md`.

The scorer weights 5 dimensions per industry profile:

| Dimension | SaaS | Fintech | Healthcare | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability (uptime + incidents) | 30% | 25% | 25% | 25% |
| Support (response P90) | 15% | 15% | 15% | 20% |
| Security (certs) | 25% | 30% | 35% | 25% |
| Commercial (renewal flexibility) | 15% | 15% | 10% | 15% |
| Strategic fit (criticality vs spend) | 15% | 15% | 15% | 15% |

Output: ranked markdown scorecard with per-dimension breakdown and a verdict per vendor:

- **KEEP** (≥ 75) — vendor is performing; routine renewal
- **REVIEW** (50-74) — schedule a quarterly business review with the