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welcome back to vendor management week today we're going to go deep into the first part of vendor management which is getting a comprehensive list of all of your vendors all the key meta properties and maintaining that so one foundational component is creating that list all your vendors and typically a bunch of key important meta information of those vendors obviously you want the name and description of that but you probably also want to track things such as what Department is using it maybe who's the owner inside the company so you know who to ask probably some financial metrics like how much you're spending and when it renews you might want to track some other components like is this a vendor that is a sub processor which has an impact on your sub processor declaration for gdpr and others so as you're maintaining all this list of vendors this essentially creates a system of record for all of your vendors now we focus on maintaining that for SAS but this is just applicable for all of your key vendors SAS in particular is critical because so much data from a company and from potentially your customers is going into your stats vendors so you really need to understand exactly all of your vendors who's managing them what kind of data is in these vendors this comprehensive set of information your vendors and the important metadata these oftentimes managed in Excel now that's a great place to start because you're getting a sense of all of this data but it's hard to maintain this in Excel because it's not automated and it's not integrated to your key business systems so the goal of a good system of record is to have it be automated and always up to date and the way you can do that is by using software and integrating that software to your key business systems so you're updating this overview of your vendors and all the important meta information in an automated collaborative way across the entire company this is really critical to maintain because as soon as you've created that system of record it's always going to be changing as you add vendors as you renew them as you maybe swap one vendor out for one use case for another and how these vendors change is a really key part of the holistic vendor management and that gets into what we call vendor lifecycle management and thinking about this not just from a database standpoint but really how your vendors are changing over time and that's what we'll dig into next stay tuned