We use thousands of vendors, and they are all entered as users in Workfront. Creating users requires admin privileges, yes, but for us that's a good thing; our ISO certification requires that we vet and qualify of any of our vendors before they can be assigned any work. Our vendor manager has admin privileges and, once she has qualified a vendor, creates the user in Workfront (with all the corresponding contact information, as well as their various rates as custom data fields attached to their profiles). Once they are in Workfront, project managers are free to assign them to tasks in their projects (just like assigning a team member). We've built a couple of different reports that helps the PMs narrow down who to assign, based on some basic criteria (such as area of expertise, time zone, and cost). You can't (yet!) select them from a dropdown menu, but if you assign using the inline edit feature you at least get Autocomplete functionality. Once the vendor is assigned, the PM can see their contact information from within the project context by switching to one of our basic Views that includes the "Assigned To Email Address" and "Assigned To Phone Number." Vendors that have a history of poor performance get deactivated by the vendor manager and can no longer be assigned to jobs; that's also critical to our ISO certification. Someone mentioned "chaos and clutter" as an argument against this approach to managing vendors, but we certainly don't experience it as chaotic or cluttered. It's all about how you organize the Workfront database and empower your users with the built-in reporting functionality. I hope this helps! ~Eric Eric Manning Language Line Translation Solutions
