by Ashley Poynter

Content Manager

VMAD: A New Way to Celebrate and Improve Your Vendor Management Program

We recently celebrated our first-ever Vendor Management Appreciation Day (VMAD) to honor the folks in charge of their organization’s vendor management program, and it was a HIT! In addition to some outstanding music and an Ode to Vendor Management, we announced the inaugural inductees to our Hall of Fame. And who could forget the announcement of our first VMAD Customer Awards?

If you missed out, don’t worry. We’ll be partying into 2024. And of course, you can join the party at any time to get free goodies and stay up-to-date on what’s happening for VMAD 2024.

We’re recapping the amazing recipients of our VMAD Customer Awards in this blog – and how they made an impact both within their organizations and among their peers. Let’s go!

VMAD Customer Awards

Vendor Management Excellence Award
Dollar & Sense Impact Award
Vendor Management Hero Award

How Vendor Management Appreciation Day Can Help

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VMAD Customer Awards

Vendor Management Excellence Award

The first award announced was our Vendor Management Excellence Award. This award goes to the PaymentWorks customer organization that has shown a thorough respect for the importance of vendor management by providing the tools, the process, and the documentation needed for their team to deliver a best-of-breed vendor management program.

Change Management Champions

Our runner-up, Columbia University, understood the value of using an automated platform for vendor onboarding and changes. Upon selecting PaymentWorks, they embraced the herculean task of redesigning their entire vendor management program to incorporate vendor onboarding via the platform. Anyone here who has ever wrestled with change management will understand how challenging it can be to upend existing processes.

With their collective focus on the importance of getting their vendor onboarding processes locked down to prevent errors and fraud, they undertook this task, and in doing so, have modeled what vendor management excellence looks like.

They have supporting online resources available for their campus users, their suppliers and their students chock full of supporting training and guidance. The university also use webpages to communicate with constituents regarding backlogs consistently and provide updates on vendor onboarding for users.

Columbia University is a true example of Vendor Management Excellence.

Upleveling UX For Better Outcomes

Our winner, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), is a team focused on the end-user experience of their vendor management program. They have proven that a keen eye on ease of use means smoother vendor onboarding and management adoption.

RIT started with the vendor experience in mind. As a result, they opted to use the PaymentWorks best practices on their form, allowing them to implement efficiently and to start using the platform as quickly as possible. Their vendor management program saw immediate results. They simplified their existing processes and improved the vendor experience by using a form already used by hundreds of thousands of vendors across the PaymentWorks network.

They also created and published exceptionally detailed help articles and how-tos for their vendors, including a section on their website dedicated to understanding and selecting appropriate commodity codes by copying and pasting from a pre-approved list.

RIT didn’t forget their internal stakeholders, either. They also put significant effort into the on-campus user experience, creating documentation and training materials that are so fantastic that we actually adopted them for our own testing and certification guides! Major applause for a vendor management program done right!

It’s another shining example of Vendor Management Excellence.

Dollar & Sense Impact Award

The Dollar & Sense Impact Award is bestowed upon the organization that used the PaymentWorks platform to convert vendors from paper to electronic payment methods, saving their organization money by converting to ACH and virtual card and/or earning revenue from virtual card payments.

Energizing Electronic Payments

Our 2023 Dollars and Sense runner-up is the City of Garland, Texas! When the City of Garland purchased PaymentWorks, their vendor base was 50% check and 50% ACH.

One of their main goals in automating vendor onboarding was to increase their Payee ACH adoption while having their internal staff feel secure/confident in mitigating any ACH fraud risk. The city implemented form changes to advise Payees that ACH is the preferred method. Subsequently, if a vendor requests a payment via check, they need to submit the reason why and then receive approval from Garland.

Now, with PaymentWorks, 92% of their vendors have opted into ACH, and their spend is at an astounding 99.6% ACH!!

Congratulations to our 2023 Dollars and Sense runner-up, the City of Garland!

Revving Up Rebate Revenue

The winner of the 2023 Dollars and Sense Impact Award goes to the City of Vista, California! The City of Vista wanted to migrate away from paying vendors with checks but had a non-centralized vendor onboarding process. As a result, the finance team had little control over preferred payment types.

This non-centralized process heightened the risk of vendor impersonation and social engineering fraud related to ACH. The risk was too real to ignore.

By moving vendor onboarding to a single point of entry through PaymentWorks, the City was able to use the vendor form to impact vendor payment types. They initially started by prioritizing ACH. Then, this summer, they changed their form to focus on Virtual Card for rebate revenue, with ACH as the second choice.

Both moves were a smashing success. The city moved from 100% check to, at present, almost 75% of vendors choosing ACH and an additional 4% choosing Virtual Card – all with no campaigning!

These successes go far beyond the money saved on checks and earned on rebate revenue. This vendor management program evolution had a real, measurable impact on their finance team structure as well.

Their Finance Manager and Deputy Treasurer, Matt McDonald, sums it up nicely at a recent Fireside Chat:

Congratulations to the 2023 Dollars and Sense Impact Award Winner, the City of Vista!

Vendor Management Hero Award

This award goes to an individual who has made the most measurable impact on their organization’s vendor management process using PaymentWorks.

Bucking Status Quo

Our runner-up for our Vendor Management Hero Award is Todd Robison at Hutto ISD! Todd is a fantastic example of someone who does not accept the status quo as “good enough.”

First, he guided his team and his organization to implement PaymentWorks as an overhaul to their entirely manual vendor onboarding and verification process. He understood what was at stake by continuing to onboard and change vendor information this way.

Next, by implementing PaymentWorks indemnification, everyone at Hutto can sleep better at night, knowing they have protected the district’s funds from being lost to a fraudster.

Most recently, Todd led the charge in updating the Hutto registration form with our best practice recommendations to drive further adoption of electronic payment types. In the first 4 months, Hutto saw an average of 14% opt-ins for virtual card payments! And that trend continues.

Todd is truly an outstanding Director of his team and an asset to PaymentWorks. Now, they are mitigating their Fraud risk, executing a Payables Strategy and automating the Payee onboarding experience.

Congratulations to the runner-up for the Vendor Management Hero Award, Todd Robison!

Striving for Excellence

Drumroll, please! Our Vendor Management Hero Award Winner for 2023 is Heather Bradley from the University of California, San Diego!

Heather actively steered the implementation project with excellence in mind, not only for her role or department but for the entire user community. She organized and led numerous highly effective training sessions for her colleagues, ensuring the effective use of PaymentWorks from day one. This dedication vastly improved the vendor onboarding process across the entire campus – and for UCSD’s vendors.

As part of the implementation, Heather’s leadership in streamlining TIN matching and other compliance requirements had a significant impact on ensuring UCSD’s continued compliance when setting up vendors. This leadership illustrates the value we are here celebrating today and shows exactly why the work done in vendor management impacts an entire organization.

And last, but certainly not least, Heather is a key part of a team who continually goes above and beyond to provide constructive, actionable feedback to the PaymentWorks product team, benefitting the entire PaymentWorks community.

Congratulations to our 2023 Vendor Management Hero Award Winner, Heather Bradley!

The celebration isn’t over, either. These elite award recipients have set the stage for what’s to come. We’ll be partying into 2024 and strongly encourage you to join! There’s plenty more in store!

How Vendor Management Appreciation Day Can Help

December 12th may be behind us, but the party’s not over yet! We’ll be celebrating Vendor Management Appreciation Day all year long…until our second annual event on December 12, 2024.

Honoring one of the most important, under-recognized roles across industries is super important to us, so we do it all year round.

Join us in observing Vendor Management Appreciation Day (VMAD) 2024! We’re gearing up for the next celebration, and we want you to be a part of it!

VMAD is a unique holiday geared toward unifying vendor management professionals and celebrating innovation in the field.

We’ve been releasing gifts each month to help you supercharge your vendor management efforts. We’re also planning some awesome events so everyone can connect and celebrate the important, strategic role of vendor management.

Learn more here, and grab some free vendor management goodies.