Score the partners your spend flows through.
A large share of marketing budget leaves through agencies and vendors, and most of them are judged on goodwill. Decifer scores them on SLA adherence and performance, and shows how much of the budget rides on a single partner, computed from your own procurement data.
Goodwill is not a scorecard.
The agencies a team has worked with longest are often the least scrutinised. A partner can miss its SLA most months and still keep the account, because no one is holding a number to it, and quietly, more and more of the budget concentrates in whoever is easiest to keep working with.
Decifer’s job here is to make the partner relationship answer to the same standard as everything else: adherence against a floor, dependency against a cap, and a dispute rate that flags a relationship turning before a contract review would.
What we won't do
- Rate a vendor on the relationship instead of the SLA.
- Ignore concentration until a renewal or an outage forces it.
- Invent a performance score, it is computed from your data.
What the module computes.
Three views of the agency and vendor base, computed from your own procurement data, by business unit.
Performance & SLA
Adherence against the floor
Each agency and vendor scored on delivery and SLA adherence, judged against the floor you set. A partner everyone likes can still be missing the SLA every month, and goodwill is a poor substitute for a scorecard.
What we measure
Vendor performance score and SLA adherence vs your minimum.
Dependency concentration
How much rides on one partner
The share of marketing spend concentrated in your top vendor. One partner doing most of the work is convenient until it is a single point of failure, in pricing, in continuity, in leverage at renewal.
What we measure
Top-vendor share of spend against the concentration cap you set.
Spend & disputes
What flows, and what gets contested
Total vendor spend and the invoice dispute rate, side by side. A rising dispute rate is an early signal of a relationship going wrong, long before it shows up in delivery or a contract review.
What we measure
Vendor spend by partner and the invoice dispute rate.
How it works, step by step.
The vendor review a disciplined procurement lead runs, with performance and dependency computed rather than assumed.
Bring in the vendor data
Engagements, spend, contracts and SLA outcomes, uploaded from your procurement file or entered by hand, per business unit, into your isolated workspace.
Score performance and SLA
Each vendor is scored on delivery and SLA adherence and judged against the floor you set, so an under-performing partner is flagged on the numbers, not on a hunch.
Compute dependency
The share of spend in your top vendor is calculated against your concentration cap, so over-reliance is visible before a renewal or an outage makes it a problem.
Watch the dispute rate
Invoice disputes are tracked as a rate per vendor, an early signal of a souring relationship that delivery metrics alone would miss.
Issue the decision
Which partner is breaching SLA, where dependency is too concentrated, and which relationship is turning, with an honest note when the data is too thin to judge.
One decision, reasoned end to end.
A measured signal, what it means, and the move. The numbers below are illustrative.
Your best-liked agency is also your biggest risk.
Signal
One agency holds 52% of marketing vendor spend, over your 40% concentration cap, while its SLA adherence has slipped to 84% against a 90% floor and its invoice dispute rate is climbing.
What changed
Nothing dramatic happened, the account simply grew because the partner was easy to keep using. Now over half the budget depends on one agency that is missing its SLA and contesting more invoices, and the dependency makes it harder to hold them to account.
The move
- Cap new work with this agency until SLA adherence is back over the floor.
- Diversify the next briefs to bring concentration under your cap.
- Put the rising dispute rate on the agenda before the renewal, not after.
Bringing dependency under the cap restores leverage, a partner you can hold to an SLA is worth more than one you simply cannot replace.
What the module reads.
Your procurement/vendor file, uploaded as CSV or XLSX, or entered by hand, both work today. No channel API is required. Every score is computed, never invented.
Dependency concentration and SLA adherence are computed from the spend and delivery figures you bring, against the cap and floor you set, not a default chosen to reassure. The scorecard you act on traces back to your own data and a formula you can read.
See which partners are earning their spend.
Bring your vendor file, and the SLA adherence, performance and dependency appear the same day, by partner.