# UPKEEP VENDOR MANAGEMENT ## Know which vendors are worth keeping A single directory of every vendor and contractor, their insurance and compliance documents with expiry dates, and a performance record graded from your own work history rather than from opinion. - COI and license expiry tracking - Scores from your own history - Shares one vendor record with Procurement Trusted by 4,000+ industrial teams ## The vendor record your spreadsheet was standing in for Most operations know who their vendors are and almost nothing about them. This is the part that decides whether a contractor should be on site at all. The vendor list is a spreadsheet, and three people keep their own copy. One directory holds every vendor and contractor, the trades they cover, the sites they serve, and who owns the relationship. When a vendor changes their phone number it changes in one place. Certificates of insurance, licenses, and W-9s sit on the vendor record with their expiry dates. Expiring documents surface weeks ahead, and a vendor without current cover can be blocked from being assigned work rather than merely flagged. The annual review with a supplier starts from whoever complained loudest. Every vendor carries a graded record built from your own history: whether they showed up when they said, whether the work held, how fast they responded, and how their pricing moved. The conversation starts from evidence. Two vendors quote the same scope and there is nothing to compare but price. Compare them side by side on rate, on-time record, rework, response time, and the sites each already covers, so the cheaper quote is weighed against what it has historically cost to use them. A vendor stops being used and nobody notices for a year. Activity, spend, and open work are visible per vendor, so a dormant account is obvious and the list stays the list of vendors you actually use, not everyone you have ever paid. ## Onboarding, compliance, and performance What you hold on a vendor, what expires, and what their record says the next time you are choosing between two of them. ### Vendor directory Every vendor and contractor with their trades, contacts, payment terms, sites served, and the internal owner of the relationship. ### Insurance and COI tracking Certificates of insurance, licenses, W-9s, and safety documents with expiry dates and warnings before they lapse. ### Onboarding requirements Set what a vendor must have on file before they can be assigned work, by trade or by site. Incomplete vendors stay visibly incomplete. ### Performance scorecards On-time, quality, responsiveness, and price scored per vendor and rolled into a grade, drawn from your own work orders and receipts. ### Vendor comparison Two or more vendors side by side on record, rate, and coverage, so an award decision is made on more than the quoted number. ### Response tracking How long each vendor takes to accept a job and to close it, measured against what the agreement says they promised. ### Spend by vendor What you spend with each vendor across sites, categories, and work types, and how that has moved year over year. ### Documents and rate cards Agreements, rate cards, scopes of work, and correspondence kept on the vendor record instead of in an inbox. ### Multi-site coverage Which vendors cover which locations, where you have a single point of failure, and which sites have no approved vendor for a trade. ## Built to work with the rest of UpKeep The vendor record is only useful if it is fed by real work. These are the hand-offs that keep it current without anyone maintaining it. ## Teams running maintenance on UpKeep 1 / 8 ### Columbia Fruit Organized technician workload and built a preventive schedule around cold storage equipment. ### Chick-fil-A Keeps kitchen equipment running across a footprint measured in thousands of sites. ### McDonald's One operator runs maintenance across every restaurant he owns from a phone. ### Caltech Moved campus crews off paper and onto digital preventive maintenance and work orders. ### Glidewell Standardized maintenance across one of the largest custom restorative labs in the world. ### Industrial manufacturer Moved from 60% reactive work to 20% by putting every asset on a recurring PM schedule. ### Layfield Group Shifted work from reactive to preventive and brought maintenance costs down with it. ### Sprinturf Replaced paper tracking and manual data entry across the plant using Nova. ## Frequently asked questions ### How is this different from UpKeep Procurement? Procurement is the transaction: a requisition, an approval, a purchase order, a receipt, a matched invoice. Vendor Management is the relationship behind those transactions: who the vendor is, what they have on file, how they have performed, and whether to keep using them. Most teams run both, and the two share one vendor record. ### And how does it differ from UpKeep Providers? Providers is the vendor-facing side, a contractor opens a portal link, sees the job assigned to them, and updates it, with no app and no license. Vendor Management is the internal side: the directory, the documents, the scores.