Beyond Cost: 5 Lessons From Our Vendor Relationship Panel and the Solution to Address Them
Managing suppliers well is rarely about any single fix. It's usually a handful of small, deliberate choices that compound over time. That was the throughline of our recent panel discussion with Eddie Roberts, Director of Financial Services at the University of Oregon, and Meaghan Mulligan, Unimarket's Director of Channels and Strategic Growth.
Here are five takeaways worth sitting with if you are reflecting on how you can improve your vendor management process.
1. Watch for the warning signs before they become a real problem
Eddie was direct about what a stagnating vendor relationship looks like in practice. It rarely announces itself. Instead, it shows up as small, easy-to-miss shifts: warranty terms that quietly get worse, restocking fees that didn't exist before, shipping charges that creep up, delivery windows that slip. In isolation these are small considerations and none of these trigger an alarm on their own. And that's exactly what makes them dangerous.
His answer wasn't a fancy early warning system. It was a habit: reviewing contracted pricing and terms with key vendors on a regular cadence, annually or biannually, rather than waiting for a problem to force the conversation.
He also flagged a second, quieter risk: vendors you've stopped actively using but never formally closed out, which just accumulate and add maintenance overhead without anyone noticing. The takeaway is less about tools and more about discipline. A vendor relationship that isn't actively reviewed isn't neutral. It's drifting, and usually not in your favor.
Unimarket solution: Catching a stagnating vendor relationship early means having visibility that doesn't depend on someone remembering to check. Unimarket's performance tracking and real-time analytics surface shifts in service level, pricing, and delivery as they happen, rather than waiting for a renewal date or a complaint to force the issue. Instead of relying on institutional memory to notice a creeping restocking fee or a slipping delivery window, the data flags it.
2. Compliance shouldn't stop at onboarding
Most teams treat vendor compliance as a one-time gate. Collect the W9, run the OFAC check, verify the TIN, then move on. Eddie pointed out the gap in that approach: a supplier can appear on a sanctions list at any point after onboarding, not just before.
The fix is treating compliance as an ongoing process rather than a single milestone. That means recurring checks, not annual ones triggered only by a renewal date, so a status change gets caught in weeks instead of surfacing during an audit a year later.
Unimarket solution: This is where Unimarket's Supplier Verification & Screening moves compliance from a one-time gate to a continuous process. Every supplier in the database gets screened against OFAC and 10 or more other US government exclusion lists, with fuzzy matching to catch near misses in spelling.
Because it runs as a background job and only triggers a notification when an actual match is detected, procurement teams get ongoing protection without a manual review queue slowing things down, and every check leaves a defensible audit trail.
3. Line-item data reveals what payment data never will
An ERP will tell you how much you spent with a vendor. It rarely tells you what you actually bought. Once Eddie's team had line-item visibility instead of just dollar totals, patterns became obvious that had been invisible before, like buying the majority of one product from a single vendor while the remainder scattered across three others with no consistent pricing.
Meaghan tied this directly to the business case for investing in supplier data in the first place. It isn't only about reducing risk; it's about the staff hours currently spent chasing insurance certificates and W9s over fax and email, hours that could go toward strategic sourcing work instead.
Unimarket solution: Spotting a pattern like 70% of a product coming from one vendor and the rest scattered across three others requires more than a payment total. Unimarket's insights and spend analysis tools give teams a source-to-pay dashboard with 360-degree custom reporting, so line-item level purchasing patterns become visible instead of buried in an ERP that only shows dollar amounts against a vendor name.
4. Strategic status has to be earned, and it pays off when it is
Not every supplier gets punch-out catalog access, and that's by design. Eddie described his team as "very judicious" about which vendors reach that level, because it signals to end users that a supplier is safe to buy from without a second thought.
Meaghan's example from her own consulting background made the payoff concrete. Years ago, her team told a strategic supplier they'd drive significant volume to their catalog. They negotiated better pricing than their existing cooperative contract offered, and the supplier's actual spend far surpassed the initial projections. When suppliers see consolidated volume coming their way, they tend to invest more back into the relationship, whether that's better terms, expanded product availability, or direct engagement with departments.
Unimarket solution: On-contract supplier enablement is exactly the mechanism for this. Once a supplier has proven reliable, integrating them into the Unimarket Marketplace as an on-contract vendor gives end users a single, easy path to buy from them, which is what drives the consolidated volume that earns better pricing in return.
Combined with the global supplier directory of vendors who already know the Unimarket process, it also means new strategic suppliers can be added with minimal onboarding friction on either side.
5. Hard conversations require hard data
Every procurement team eventually faces a supplier conversation nobody wants to have; pricing has crept up, service has slipped, delivery times have fallen short of KPIs. Eddie's advice for teams without a clean system in place was to gather whatever data exists first, check payments, P-card records, even employee reimbursements, before walking into that discussion.
Meaghan put the stakes plainly. Without a consolidated source of truth, "based on what?" is the question that ends most performance conversations before they really start. A single system that tracks pricing history, service levels, and delivery data doesn't just make QBRs easier. It's what makes vendor accountability possible at all.
Unimarket Solution: Walking into a vendor conversation with proof instead of memory depends on having a system that already holds the history. Unimarket's contracts capability keeps a central repository with milestone management, so pricing terms and obligations are documented and trackable, while the same insights and performance tracking used for early warning signs also become the evidence base for a QBR. The result is a single source of truth that turns "based on what?" into an answer instead of a dead end.
The common thread: none of these are technology problems on their own. They're process and ownership problems that technology can support once the groundwork is in place. That's the order Eddie's team followed, and it's the order Meaghan recommends to every organization she works with.