Data notifications received from vendors are being sent in increasing volumes and becoming harder for IT teams to manage. Many are not customer-specific and are irrelevant, causing unwanted “noise” and making it harder to spot the important changes that can impact your business.
Add to this an increase in regulations that can easily lead to fees and audits, because when multiple notifications from several vendors are managed manually, some will inevitably fall through the cracks.
While there are many vendor data notification solutions on the market, most require the manual mapping of inventory data and user alerts. They don’t offer a single system that already holds all your enterprise’s inventory and stores the products and services you’re subscribed to. The new Data Notifications module from Calero is different because data notifications are auto-loaded and automatically map to related inventory data.
Many systems require additional manual inventory data loading and management, however, this system utilizes innovative technology to automatically onboard, structure, categorize, and allocate each data notification record. In other words, you can determine right away if the vendor is making a policy change that could lead to an audit if not handled immediately or if this is just one more price change.
If it is a price change, the solution’s full dashboard reporting will provide an immediate insight — how the change will affect your organization based on your current inventory. In fact, you’ll see an impact analysis on every notification and how it will affect related inventory, including users, services, IDs, applications and contracts. For instance, you’ll know how many employees are using this software and if this notification is even important enough to warrant action. In its second phase, this solution will also automatically alert application users with notifications, questionnaires or automatic cancellations, as well as automatically action inventory data based upon agreed rules and trigger events.
Right now, it can take a three-person market data team to properly manage data notifications—sifting through the data, interpreting it, and deciding which actions to take. This system takes away the manual pain of putting data notifications in a spreadsheet, mapping it and reaching out to users with the actions they need to take. Your team can spend more time on important endeavors that deliver on business objectives, analysis and strategy.
Ultimately, this technology allows businesses to have more than two options: invest the time and effort of your team to manage notifications or just ignore them and wait for the changes to occur. The latter is a real operational risk. With this solution, you have a third option—you can be proactive and avoid the very real danger of not being aware or prepared if there’s a change to a vendor’s data policy, and you’re hit with a significant fee.
MDM’s Vendor Data Notification System is available now from Calero.
