How willing is your vendor to provide you or a consultant that you hire with information about your fleet? Have you ever asked? Recently, we requested fleet information on behalf of a school district in central California. Our client had hired us to give them an objective evaluation of their document production fleet. The vendor, who has been managing the account for 20 years, would not provide us with information unless we agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement. We could not agree to sign the confidentiality agreement - if the results of our report were shared during the school district’s next board meeting, we would be in violation of the agreement. Also, the data we gathered will probably be used in the district’s next acquisition. Our client ended up requesting the information be sent directly to her, and then she forwarded it to us once she received it. The vendor had to know that was going to happen. Here’s the key concern: The vendor made their client jump through hoops to get information. And, the vendor delayed their client’s project by doing so. We typically find that vendors who are ready and willing to share information are more focused on meeting their client’s needs in the long run than the vendors who hesitate or even completely withhold information. My favorite part of this whole situation was our client’s comment. She said, basically, “We’ve been buying equipment based on their recommendation for years, and it’s time they did something for us.”

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Fleet Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.