Knowing your vendors

The first step toward managing your vendors and creating a vendor portfolio is to know the exact current pool of vendors. After you have identified your vendors, you can add and track important information about them and create links to other applications in

. If your IT organization has licensed , you can also create links to Projects.

The main window in is the Vendors window. This window displays a searchable list of vendors and is the starting point for access to all the vendor information in the system. You can populate the vendor data by importing data from another system, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, or by typing the data manually.

After the inventory has been completed, you can view an aggregate list of contracts or obligations across vendors. You can customize your Home page to display a list of your vendors. When you select the My Vendors portlet to be displayed on your Home page, all vendors for which you have been identified as the owner are displayed up to a maximum number of vendors you specify.