8 min read

Guide

The operations and IT teams are responsible for a whole range of different activities including ensuring the office space is equipped with the necessary facilities for all employees at all times. For this process to be managed efficiently, it requires these teams to be on the ball. 

This guide will walk you through the steps to create a simple, streamlined process to make sure you and your vendors are collaborating as efficiently as possible.

Create your board

To get started, the first thing you’ll need to do is create your shareable board so that you can work and communicate on your monday.com board, along with external vendors. 

Next, you can start customizing your board by adding groups, items and columns. Check out below how we’re organizing our board:

• Groups

Groups allow you to break down and organize your tasks into time periods, phases or anything else that you need. In this case, we’ve divided our groups into “Pending Requests” and “Completed Requests”

• Items

Each item will represent a new order sent in to the vendor. It will first be added to the group “Pending requests” which will be moved to “Completed requests” upon completion.  

• Columns

Columns are a useful way to reflect all important pieces of information in one place, keeping them visual and accessible. 

Show me the columns we've used

• Creation date column to track the date when we first put in the order with our vendor
• Number columns to represent the # of the item we will need (eg. 5 new laptops) as well as to track the price per item
• Formula column to calculate the expected cost based on the price and number of items.
• Status columns to represent the status of the request, as well as if the pricing quote was approved or not. 
• File column to add in quotes, and receipts 
• People column to assign IT or Operations team members responsible for this item

Share your board with your vendors

Now that your board structure is complete, start sharing! Remember, because this is a shareable board, we can simply add our external vendor to the board. They will get access only to the boards I share with them.  Learn more about what guests can do here. 

Create reports

With the help of the views on your board, you can flip whatever data you have on your board to give you a visual breakdown of what’s going on. 

You can add the Chart View to reflect at a glance how many orders are in each stage of the process or to see a breakdown assigned IT /Ops team member. In the example below, you can see the number of requests in each stage of the ordering process, stacked by its quote approval status.

Communicate easily

Say goodbye to long Excel sheets, million-page email threads and spending 15 minutes searching every channel to find that latest order you sent in to your vendor! With your monday.com board, you can cut out all the unnecessary extra emails, and keep it all in one place. To interact and chat with your vendors, you can use the Update Section. 

Here, you can add comments, add instructions, reminders and anything else you might want to discuss, keeping all your communication with your vendors in context. 

Collaborate on files

To discuss pricing and negotiate with your vendors you can use the annotation feature. All you need is to open up a file you've uploaded to your file column, and start communicating. To learn more about annotation, check this out.

Tip: Take the collaboration with your team a step further by using monday workdocs. 

Automate your workflow

Putting in requests, calling vendors for updates, waiting around, receiving the order, updating your files, switching platforms, updating the vendor.. we know the drill. Whose got time for all that anyways? With the help of monday.com’s powerful automations, you can cut down on the wasted time and get updated with personalized notifications. Below are the two automations we've used to streamline our workflow: 

• Whenever a new request has been added, notify the vendor. This will cut down the need to send an email with the order as well as verifying that the vendor received it!
• Whenever the status pricing quote has been approved, notify the vendor that they can continue with delivery. This will speed up the entire process, making things move smoother and be frictionless!

Tip: An entire chain of automations can be set up with every status change triggering a new notification, moving the item and more. Learn more about this here.

Integrate with your favorite tools

Do your vendors like to receive their requests via updates or even text messages? That's no problem at all! You can step it up by integrating your monday.com account with external platforms such as your email (eg. Gmail, Outlook) and with messaging platforms (eg. Twilio, Slack) and many more!

In our case, we're going to create a quick Twilio integration, to allow us to notify our vendor via text message whenever a new request is put in. 

Gain insights with Dashboards

We're strong believers in tracking data and making data-driven decisions. As such, our easy-to-setup, visual dashboards allow you to gain overviews and insights on all relevant IT information, including collaborating and managing your vendors!

We've created a dashboard that allows us an overview of everything IT-related!

Discover the widgets we've used

• Numbers widget to track, compare and display the amount of money spent on IT equipment in each quarter and our open IT tickets
• Battery widget to display the progress of our IT tasks from across our entire account
• Workload widget to show the resource allocation of all our IT teammembers
• Chart widget to display another visual breakdown of all current tasks being handled by the IT team

There you go! You're officially ready to get started collaborating with your vendors in one easy, interactive platform!

If you have any questions about this or anything else in this article, feel free to reach out to us at customer success at support@monday.com