What exactly does a vendor manager do? Who do they manage? Find out all about this role and how it works in the localization industry.
What’s up? What’s up everyone? This is Andrej.
Welcome to the new localization basics. In this one, we’re going to talk about VM, WTF is VM?
VM stands for Vendor Management, management or the role of a vendor manager. So what exactly does a vendor manage do? They manage the vendors.
We didn’t talk much about who are vendors, although the situation is very simple, you have an LSP, go check a previous video LSP provide localization or language services for their clients. But the way that they do it is that they don’t actually have million gazillion translators employed working for the LSP. What they actually do is they outsource! outsource…
What they do is that they actually outsource the work to multiple freelancers around the world. And this can also be other LSPs, as well. And guess what the person who is actually managing all these external partners or vendors is the vendor manager. Right. So what their role is, is that they need to find the right freelancers that we want to work with. Because let’s say I don’t know, we have a client who wants to translate something into Arabic. So we need to find translators, or LSPs, who can do our Arbic translation. And then what they do is also they negotiate prices with these people to make sure that LSP actually makes profit on the project that they outsource, and then they deliver it to the client. So they make some money on top of that. And then the vendor manager can, you know, look at the overall performance of the vendors. If there are some escalations from the PM, they can contact the freelancers and try to work out a plan. Or if people don’t work out, they just slowly try to get rid of them. And that’s the role of a vendor manager.
What else they can do? They can also help with their training because you know, if you have new tools that your clients want you to use, and your freelancers don’t know how to use them, you might want to train them. That’s another thing that they can do. And that’s it. In general try to be supportive to the freelancers because in a way, they’re a part of your team. So that is what is VM vendor management or vendor manager.
See you in the next one.
