What is our vendor roadmap?
The business question What is our vendor roadmap? shows contracts from both the vendor perspective as well as the buyer perspective.
Review contract lifecycles and costs as well as the applications and components that the contracts provide. Manage contract renewal dates in a timely manner by ensuring that successor contracts are available in order to mitigate risks to your enterprise. This business questions sheds light on which products and services your organization is buying so that you can consolidate software purchasing and optimize costs by using preferred third-party vendors.
The license package Contract Management is required to work with this business question.
The visualization is a Gantt chart that shows the lifecycles of vendors/organization providing contracts or organizations buying the contracts. The assets displayed on the first and third level of the Gantt chart depend on report settings.
- Click What is our vendor roadmap? in the Analysis content page and then click the
local filter button. - Specify the Vendor View / Buyer View field to determine whether vendors/organizations providing contracts or organizations buying the contracts are displayed on the first level.
- Specify the 3rd Level Elements field to define whether applications and components or contract items are shown on the third level.
Here's how to interpret the information:
- If you selected Vendor View, the first level shows
vendors and 
organizations that provide the contracts. The Buyer View shows the organizations that buy the contracts. The columns show the total costs of the contracts for the vendor/buyer and the status of the contract. The timeline shows a colored bar starting with the earliest start date of the contracts of the vendor/buyer and ending with the latest end date of the contracts. A 
dark blue diamond on the timeline highlights review dates that the vendor/buyer needs to pay attention to. - The second level shows the
contract. The colored bar shows the period of validity (start date - end date) of the contract. The total costs of the contract and its contract items are shown in the Total Costs column. A 
light blue diamond on the timeline highlights the contract's review date. A 
diamond on the bar will highlight an overuse if more licenses are allocated for the contract deliverable than are permissible. - If you selected Architecture in the 3rd Level Elements field, the third level shows
applications or 
components. If you selected Contract Items , you will see the contract items and their individual costs. The colored bar shows the time period that the licenses are valid. - The blue vertical line indicates the current date.
- Relationships between predecessor and successor applications as well as predecessor and successor contracts are displayed as vertical lines.
- A blue vertical line begins at the end of the predecessor contract and points to the start of the successor contract. Point to the blue line to view a tooltip showing the predecessor contract, successor contract, and end date of the predecessor contract.
- A grey vertical line begins at the end of the lifecycle of an application or component and points to the start of the successor application/component lifecycle. Point to the grey line to view a tooltip showing the predecessor application, successor application, and end date of the predecessor application.
Vendors and the contracts must be in the repository and well-documented. The following data is required about contracts in order to have meaningful results:
- Every contract should have the Start Date, End Date, and Review Date attributes defined.
- If contract items are specified, their Start Date, End Date, and Review Date attributes should also be defined.
- Every contract (or its contract items) should have contract deliverables defined. The specification of each contract deliverable should include the Architecture Element which indicates the application or component as well as the volume of licenses that is being bought.
- The applications and components specified as architecture elements should have the Start Date and End Date attributes defined as well as their lifecycle statuses defined.
- Ideally each contract also has a predecessor contract specified so that it is clear what dependencies exist between predecessor and successor contracts.
Go to the Data Quality page and resolve the issues to ensure that the data is complete.
Go to the Data Source page to review the contracts, applications, and components that are used to answer the business question. The data source is a list report and cannot be edited.