Vendor sales conversations about new hardware and software implementations often give the wrong idea about the process. There’s an emphasis on installing the tool, launching officially, and reaping the rewards. Simple, right? In our experience, the process is rarely so cut and dry.
Business leaders often get sucked into a swamp as they align disparate systems, verify revised workflows, troubleshoot unexpected glitches, follow up with vendors, and handle other behind-the-scenes activities necessary for any IT initiative.
If you don’t have a CTO, you can quickly feel lost in the woods. Even with IT leadership, the process is time-consuming, diverting your attention from big-picture, strategic work.
However, managing vendor relationships doesn’t need to be exhausting. Here’s how the right managed IT support services partner can help handle the little details and ensure your IT initiatives deliver what the scope of work promised.
Aligning Different Vendors
Most IT products aren’t isolated. Integration and configuration with your databases, cloud platforms, applications, hardware, and overall tech stack require careful coordination to merge the new with the old. Quality partners will delineate their plan and pinpoint obstacles in their scope of work (SOW) documents, but challenges can still arise as multiple vendors converge.
The issue is each vendor will have their own strategies, policies, methodologies, and priorities. One vendor might have APIs prepared to integrate with a third party and others will need to develop them. One vendor might provide detailed integration documentation, and others may provide delayed support ticket help or leave you digging through forums. There’s no uniformity unless you make it.
Rather than dealing with dysfunction, you can leverage an IT support partner to work as an air traffic controller. For example, we help our clients by managing vendor relationships and coordinating with them to align their deliverables and timelines. We set expectations, unify definitions, follow up routinely to prevent delays, and keep our clients apprised of potential bottlenecks.
Plus, we often have direct connections to a variety of vendors across the IT space. This allows us to bypass the rigmarole of ticketing systems if we need to nudge people or even assemble necessary stakeholders on a call to hash out who is responsible for which deliverables. Because sometimes, the fastest way to solve a problem isn’t a ticket—it’s knowing who to bother and when to bother them.
Troubleshooting Issues
No matter how well you prepare, something almost always goes sideways during implementation. Integrations break, APIs malfunction, data migrations miss critical data, user-access-rights creep, and other problems disrupt your plans. Resolving the issue quickly is important but requires coordination of all the moving parts.
For example, our team recently intervened to help a client implement an ERP solution across their business and troubleshoot integration issues with their industrial scales and specialized label printers. We rigorously tested their systems to determine the problem wasn’t a user error (it wasn’t) and then frankly told the vendor they were responsible for the solution if they wanted to keep our client’s business.
These types of problems are exactly where an experienced managed IT services company is indispensable. We can dig into each part of an implementation, figure out the source of the issue, and coordinate the fixes. This takes the guesswork off your plate so you can focus on change management and next steps.
Keeping Your Tech Stack Current
Even after the launch, IT migraines might rear their ugly head again. Software or hardware might function properly for a time, but the dynamic nature of updates, patches, and end of support (EOS) can cause issues. Your organization needs to proactively monitor planned releases from vendors to avoid any disruption in your normal operations.
Staying on top of every system’s lifecycle is a full-time job. Vendors roll out patches on different schedules, deprecate features with little warning, and occasionally introduce accidental defects. Without centralized oversight, your stack can drift out of sync, and suddenly the thing that used to work just fine, doesn’t.
That’s where a managed IT partner becomes essential. We monitor vendor roadmaps, track EOS dates, and test updates before they hit production environments. Our team works behind the scenes to coordinate upgrades across your environment, prevent version mismatches, and flag changes that might affect compliance or performance. Again, managing vendor relationships through a reliable point of contact can help us to prevent the worst outcomes.
Simplifying Vendor Relationships
The reality is, even the most advanced tech stack still comes down to people—how they communicate, coordinate, and follow through. That’s why having a partner who’s embedded in your organization but has an outside perspective can be such a game changer. We operate like an extension of your team, translating business needs into technical requirements, advocating for your goals with vendors, and showing up to conversations as if we were your CTO.
Because we’ve built relationships across the vendor landscape, we can talk the talk, navigate the bureaucracy, and cut through red tape when something needs to get done. Whether you’ve brought us in to run the show or to help manage vendors you’ve already selected, our job is the same: smooth out the rough edges, share in the successes, and absorb as much of the vendor headache as possible so you don’t have to.
Need help managing vendor relationships for your next implementation? Want a long-term partner that can handle the big picture? Cubex Group can deliver results.
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