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;
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.