Policy, Program and Procedures

Hello everyone,

We're in the process of creating categories for each of our vendor relationships. We're a financial institution, specifically, a credit union. Does anyone have a list of categories related to our type of business that they would be willing to share?

Current state, we don't categorize the types of products/service our vendor provides. How granular does your organization go to categorize these vendor relationships? For example, do you have categories such as Loan Origination Systems, Janitorial, Core, Software, etc. 

If someone is willing to share or provide insight, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

We are trying to do the same, we are an Insurance company, would love if anyone could share!

We categorize vendors as Operational (used in our core operational business for services), Corporate (HR, non ops  business activities like accounting FP&A), Facilities (anything related to the buildings, security, cleaning crews, maintenance/repairs etc.)  and NonOperational (technology/IT)  

Hi Neil

We are a Core Bank provider (Fintech) with our primary customers being community banks.  As a core we deal with many vendors to support our services to the bank but also work with Bank 3rd parties that  need an integration or API connection to perform certain products to the bank directly requiring information that we have for that specific client.  

I say all this to say, we are somewhat similar therefore our approach has been making our categories a bit more specific. We have Security, Print & Copy Services, Business Continuity, HR, Consultants, Electronic Banking , Account Opening Service etc.  We have found this approach more useful to internal users but the jury is still out as to whether I agree with this approach.  Often times, I feel there are too many categories.  

I would be happy to further discuss if you like.

Mellisa

Hi Neil,

I've been down this path a few times and would recommend you consider an industry standard like UNSPSC (UNSPSC > Home) to base your category listing on.  The reason I say this, a number of procurement systems for business spend management have adopted these categories for classification of products and services for ease in integrating when using third parties for punchout catalogs.  Although a bit of a different lens from categories for TPRM specifically, aligning TPRM categories with procurement classifications can help keep things uniform.  This being said, UNSPSC code (in example) are much more robust than you might need for a financial institution specifically.  You can of course scale back the types of categories and level of detail you use.  If you do choose to go a different path, consider to the extend you may want to segment your products and services to best categories for the purposes of your program.

Not sure if this is the correct way to do this or not, but we use the 'Category' identifier for our departments & then use 'Product Type' to classify for function such as SaaS, Loan Source, Facility Management, eta.