Bringing oversight, diligence and ease to managing a global provider network - Topia

In this blog, Topia Director of Product, Chantel Rowe, explores the thinking and approach to the exciting Spring Release update to vendor management.

When you step back and think about it, the supply chain of partners who support a company’s talent mobility program is most likely one of the most complex in the company. Maybe 2 global relocation providers, 3 tax providers, 10 immigration firms, 2 medical insurance providers and then a host of local destination services firms, real estate brokers and language schools – with total fees often adding up to the hundreds of millions each year. 

Companies often struggle to gather data on and manage these disparate relationships – potentially understanding elements like cost from invoicing data, but often relying on data provided by the vendor themselves to assess satisfaction, SLA attainment and overall value provided through the services. 

On top of that, we’ve increasingly seen customers pushing the selection and management of providers to their local offices – allowing them to work with providers who may be particularly strong in a given market or have local relationships which cannot be beaten by global providers imposed by headquarters. 

And even where customers are not satisfied with their providers or want to explore new ways of supporting their mobile employees, the effort required to RFP for a new provider and re-set up the relationship, system integrations, migrate open employee cases and potentially lose historic relationship data will often prohibit companies from making the change. 

Last year, Topia introduced our standard provider management dashboards as part of our Insights analytics engine, and with our Spring release we introduced our provider relationship management tools, aiming to:

• Give our customers a clear, real time view of their global provider network supporting mobility
• Allow customers to quickly see data such as total number of times used, total cost, in comparison to other providers
• Cater for the complexities of ‘what provider is used, where, for whom’ by setting up things like geo or move type restrictions on provider usage
• Empower customers to quickly change their active network – adding new providers, expanding or contracting use of existing providers and deactivating providers where needed, and
• Ensure no reimplementation or development work is required where customers want to change elements of their provider network. 

As soon as changes are made using Topia’s vendor management tools, customers are able to initiate services to their providers as updated and go on with supporting their mobile employees

And, as with all things Topia, we’ve continued on our quest to give both our mobility and non-mobility users great, user focussed tools with a drive towards ease, experience and insights. No jargon, no complex configuration – just clear language, clean user interfaces and intuitive visualizations throughout the user journey. 

We’re super excited to give our customers an insight into their provider network they might never have had before, and make it incredibly easy for mobility teams to be able to make the best provider choices for their stakeholders on a day to day basis. To learn more about vendor management with Topia click here or request a demo to see it in action.