Select The Right
Vendors For International Projects
How do you identify specific vendors? One approach is to
employ the in-country employees to ascertain what vendors are being used and
what results have been obtained. This is good for several reasons. First, it
gets the local office involved in the process so that they are part of the
solution as opposed to a problem. Second, you probably will get better
information than from their head office.
In parallel, work from headquarters to identify potential firms
through the accounting and consulting relationships that you already have. You
will want to coordinate this with the local office work and indicate to the
consultants that you are also doing a local search.
Another approach is to use the Web if you are looking for specific
types of expertise. This is a general search and may not yield much. However,
every now and then the limited effort has proven worthwhile.
What is right in a standard project often depends on various
attributes of their technical capabilities. Do they have a track record and
presence in a specific country? What is the staffing and relationship of the
in-country office with the headquarters of the vendor firm?
Figure 8.3 gives
several areas for vendor evaluation beyond the normal ones of firm history,
financial condition, and track record. You should probably start raising these
questions and areas early. That will help narrow the field of potential firms.
Your company already probably has an established method for
procurement. Typically, you construct a document in which the requirements for
the vendor are spelled out. Then purchasing adds the necessary boilerplate and a
Request for Quotation (RFQ) or a Request for Proposal (RFP) is issued. Make sure
that your RFP or RFQ contains the following items:
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Exact tasks that the vendor will be required to perform;
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Milestones associated with these tasks;
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How milestones and work will be assessed in terms of
quality;
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How the vendor is expected to interact with headquarters and
project management;
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How the vendor is expected to interact with local office
managers and staff;
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How issues are to be resolved;
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How decisions are to be made;
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The project template and plan;
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Initial list of issues and potential problems.
You want to make it clear that there is to be a common project
plan. You cannot afford to spend hours in meetings reconciling their plans with
yours. There should be an agreed upon approach for tracking issues. We suggest a
common issues database. Another thing to insist on in the RFP is that you expect
that the vendor staff will participate in lessons learned meetings in which
knowledge is to be transferred from them to internal employees on a regular
basis—not just at the end of the work. In general, the more detail you put in
here, the easier it will be later and the fewer surprises there will be.
Selecting the right vendors for political work is more
complex. You have to ensure that the firm is well placed with the government.
You can, of course, listen to their sales pitch. However, a better approach is
to find out what other firms they have assisted and then see what happened.
Again, using a separate consultant to help in this selection can be very useful.
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