vendor-review

The vendor-review skill provides a structured framework for evaluating a vendor across cost, risk, performance, and fit, producing a clear recommendation for procurement decisions. It fits several situations: assessing a new vendor proposal, deciding whether to renew or replace an existing contract, comparing two vendors side by side, or assembling a total-cost-of-ownership breakdown and negotiation points before procurement sign-off. To run, it asks for the vendor name, the context (new evaluation, renewal, or comparison), and supporting details such as contract terms, pricing, a proposal document, or current performance data.

The evaluation framework has four parts. Cost analysis captures total cost of ownership rather than just license fees, including implementation and migration, training and onboarding, ongoing support and maintenance, and exit costs. Risk assessment weighs vendor financial stability, security and compliance posture, concentration risk, contract lock-in and exit terms, and business continuity. Performance metrics cover SLA compliance, support response times, uptime, feature delivery cadence, and customer satisfaction. For comparisons it builds a side-by-side matrix spanning pricing, features, integrations, security, support, contract terms, and references.

Output follows a fixed template: a short recommendation, cost and risk tables, strengths, concerns, a Proceed, Negotiate, or Pass decision with reasoning, and explicit negotiation points. When connectors are available, it can search a knowledge base for existing evaluations and procurement policies, and pull current contract terms, spend history, and renewal dates from a procurement system to compare pricing against existing agreements.