Deliver Performance Reviews at Scale with Canary

By Steve Isaac
Published On May 16, 2024

While the above comment was made to us jokingly by a state CPO, we in public procurement know it hides that grain of truth. We hear it repeatedly from procurement leaders. Despite best intentions, too many suppliers don’t hear a word from purchasing until the contract is up.

Vendor performance management is understood to be a best practice, but we know that it isn’t evenly applied – if it’s even applied at all. So, why not?

      • Time/Bandwidth – For a government with hundreds or even thousands of suppliers, vendor performance management – as it is traditionally done, in the form of in-person business reviews – cannot be conducted at scale. Sure, a sophisticated agency may hold QBRs for their top 20 suppliers, but there simply isn’t time to orchestrate meetings like this for every supplier.
      • Substance – And even if they had the time, for performance management to be effective, contract managers need substantive customer feedback to provide to the supplier. But outside of the occasional ornery end user phone call (anecdotal evidence and not a good bellwether for performance) procurement just doesn’t always have useful customer feedback to share.

Canary, the Contract Performance Intelligence Platform from Procurated, now solves both of these problems. Canary’s new performance feedback sharing functionality lets the governments and higher education institutions using Canary deliver substantive, impactful business reviews to every single supplier.

Inside Supplier Performance Feedback Sharing

Canary’s new sharing functionality takes the long-time pipe dream of CPOs everywhere – to understand and improve the performance of every supplier under contract – and makes it possible using new technology.

      • Every contracted supplier’s Canary Performance Feedback page is available to contract managers at any time – providing a real time understanding of performance.
      • Canary Performance Feedback can be shared back to the supplier with one press of a button – driving them to address shortcomings and opening the door for agency-supplier collaboration.
      • AI-powered performance overviews turn qualitative reviews into actionable “Pros” and “Cons” of supplier performance.
      • Contract Mangers can see overall ratings, as well as each supplier’s performance across four subcategories: Customer Service, Pricing/Value, Quality, and Timeliness.

PROCUREMENT PROFESSIONALS: Want to bring the power of Canary to your procurement organization?

 

For suppliers, their government customers are no longer black boxes sealed with red tape. With review-powered performance feedback, they unlock new levels of adaptability and customer satisfaction.

 

      • Suppliers can view reviews of their performance broken down by which contract their goods/services were bought off of.
      • Suppliers can see feedback sources down to the local level, letting them know which agencies they deliver for consistently, and which they need to pay more attention to.
      • Suppliers can see how their performance stacks up against their competition on contract, helping them to discover new opportunities and increase their share of overall spend.

  • SUPPLIERS: Competitive intelligence, spend insights, performance data and more are coming soon to Canary for Suppliers.

Contract Performance Intelligence – Our Data-driven Future

This is just the beginning. Our team is working tirelessly to add more data and features to Canary. We are also working on communication tools so that these digital business reviews serve as conversation starter. We help you to open the door for suppliers and contract managers to solve big problems collaboratively before they threaten the health of the contract.

The full contract term is too long to go without talking to your suppliers, no matter how small they are. By incorporating end user feedback and aggregating it into insights, contract managers and suppliers get to be proactive in making sure they are delivering the best value. In this way, contract managers can rest easy, knowing that big issues aren’t slipping through the cracks and they aren’t going to accidentally overlook poor performance – especially at renewal time. And suppliers have a new lifeline – an opportunity to better understand and leverage their strengths while shoring up their weaknesses.

Get started with Canary to discover how your agency can better manage performance for every single supplier.