The Vendor Relationship That Feels Good Until It Doesn't
Most organizations maintain their approved vendor list as a spreadsheet or a contacts directory that answers exactly one question: do we have this company's phone number? What it doesn't answer — until a project is underway and the problem is already live — is whether this provider has demonstrated adequate product knowledge in prior engagements, what their response time to emergency call-outs looks like on a bad day, and whether the bank's procurement compliance team has flagged them for the CRES process.
The Preference ranking field — 1st, 2nd, 3rd — is the operational triage that a raw list of vendors can't provide. When a call-out situation materializes at 2pm on a Friday and you need a specialist on site by end of day, you don't have time to evaluate the full vendor list. You call the 1st preference. If they're unavailable, you call the 2nd. That ranking is built on the evaluations in the record, not on whoever last handed someone a business card.
The Evaluation Fields That Distinguish Records From References
Product Knowledge rated Good/Fair/Poor is the field that most procurement databases omit. A vendor who is excellent at showing up and adequate at fixing problems is a different risk profile than a vendor who deep-knows their product but is chronically unreachable. Having both Response to Call-outs and Product Knowledge as separate rated fields per provider gives you a two-dimensional quality picture.
A vendor rated Good on Product Knowledge and Poor on Response to Call-outs is exactly the right profile for a planned maintenance contract where you schedule work months in advance. They are exactly the wrong profile for a critical systems call-out list where the window for intervention is measured in hours.
Years in Business and Number of Staff together contextualize the size and stability of the relationship. A 3-year-old company with 4 staff has a different business continuity risk than a 22-year firm with 80 people. Annual Turnover adds the financial scale — a supplier whose annual revenue is close to the value of a single large contract they hold with your organization is in a dependency relationship that creates its own risk. Reference Customers is where these assessments become verifiable: actual organizations who have used this provider, whose procurement or facilities team can confirm whether the evaluation ratings on the record match experience.
Contact Hierarchy and Why Both Levels Matter
Primary contact (cFirst/cLast, cPhone, cEmail) and representative contact (rFirst/rLast, rMobile, rEmail) with Position and Job Title fields address a genuine operational problem: the person who signs the contract is rarely the person who answers the emergency call at 7am on a Monday, and vice versa.
The representative contact is often a field technician, account manager, or operations coordinator — the person with operational authority to dispatch resources and make decisions within their service scope. Having both contacts in the record means that when the primary contact is in a meeting or on leave, there is an escalation path that doesn't require anyone to Google the company's general number and work their way through a reception queue.
Bank Approval status — Sourcing, CRES — is the compliance gate field that determines whether a vendor can be engaged for a specific type of purchase or whether they've been through the bank's supplier registration process. Organizations that operate under procurement governance frameworks frequently have two-tier approval structures: a sourcing team that qualifies vendors initially, and a CRES (Credit Risk or Corporate Real Estate Services, depending on the context) process that governs larger or more sensitive engagements. Having both states visible per vendor means the procurement team can filter for CRES-approved vendors instantly when a contract requires it, rather than discovering mid-engagement that the provider hasn't completed the compliance registration.