The Problem
When Their Delay Becomes Your Breach
A single slow vendor (cloud, ISP, SaaS, logistics, creative subcontractor) can cascade into your SLA misses, reopens, and angry stakeholders. Without evidence, escalation, and remedies wired into contracts, you eat the cost—credits, rework, and renewal risk. This playbook makes vendor impact visible, actionable, and recoverable.
The Framework
Risk Conditions (Act Early)
Treat these as early-warning signals to engage the vendor before your SLOs wobble:
- Upstream case aging above OLA target (e.g., > 24/48h with no status update)
- Repeat incidents tied to the same product/service over 14–30 days
- Rising reopen rate on categories dependent on this vendor
- Vendor maintenance / change windows overlapping your peak periods
- Ticket correlation: ≥ 10–15% of your SLA-at-risk tickets reference the vendor
Action: Assemble evidence, open the escalation track, and enable a workaround path.
Issue Conditions (Already in Trouble)
Move to containment if any apply:
- Your SLA breaches are directly linked to vendor cases (chain of timestamps)
- Credits paid or forecasted due to vendor latency
- Executive escalation from your customer naming the vendor dependency
Action: Invoke remedies, communicate impact with proof, and re-route service where possible.
Common Diagnostics
Fast checks to select the right path:
- OLA specificity: Is the vendor OLA clear (targets, clocks, severity, comms cadence)?
- Evidence quality: Do you have linked IDs and time-stamped events showing delay impact?
- Workaround feasibility: Can you bypass, roll back, or substitute a component temporarily?
- Change/maintenance clash: Did vendor changes align with your blackout windows?
- Systemic vs isolated: Is this a one-off incident or a trend across regions/customers?
Step-by-Step Guide
Evidence & Escalation
Actions:
- Create a vendor dossier: affected tickets, timestamps, severity, business impact, screenshots/logs
- Open OLA escalation: follow ladder (support → duty manager → TAM → exec) with SLAs for updates
- Request ETA & mitigation: interim steps, rollback plan, or workaround acknowledgment
- Communicate to customers: send risk notice referencing vendor case ID and your mitigation plan
Expected Impact: Faster vendor attention; documented causality for remedies.
Mitigation & Continuity
Actions:
- Implement workaround: switch path, roll back version, degrade gracefully (reduced feature set)
- Re-route service: alternate provider, cached content, manual process, or temporary policy change
- Prioritize queues: fast-track P1/P2 tied to vendor impact; pause non-urgent intake if contracts allow
- Increase update cadence: internal every 2–4h; external daily or per clause
Expected Impact: Limits SLA damage; maintains trust via visible control.
Commercial Remedies
Actions:
- Invoke contractual remedies: credits/penalties, service extensions, or professional services at vendor expense
- Cost recovery: attribute credits and rework cost to vendor per pass-through clauses
- Amend OLA/contract: tighter response/restore targets, explicit blackout windows, redundancy obligations
- Performance plan: vendor CAP (corrective action plan) with milestones and reporting cadence
Expected Impact: Recoups losses; reduces repeat risk.
Hardening & Alternatives
Actions:
- Vendor scorecard: MTTA/MTTR/OLA compliance, incident rate, maintenance hygiene
- Dual-vendor or failover pattern where justified (multi-AZ/region, secondary provider, on-prem fallback)
- Change governance: require pre-change notice windows, rollback criteria, and joint testing for critical paths
- Runbook library: codify workarounds; add synthetic monitoring for early detection
Expected Impact: Resilience increases; future vendor issues detected and contained earlier.
KPIs to Track
| Metric | Target |
|---|---|
| Vendor-attributed SLA breaches | ↓ to 0 |
| Vendor case aging vs OLA | Within agreed clocks |
| Time to vendor escalation resolution | ↓ 25–50% vs prior incidents |
| Reopen rate (vendor-dependent categories) | Baseline or better |
| Customer SLA compliance | At/above tier despite vendor incidents |
Warning Signals
Real Scenarios
Cloud Provider Outage Impact
Context
AWS/Azure service degradation causing customer-facing issues, SLAs at risk.
Steps
- 1.Document all affected tickets with timestamps and vendor case IDs
- 2.Escalate through vendor support ladder to TAM
- 3.Implement degraded-mode workaround where possible
- 4.Communicate proactively to affected customers
- 5.Invoice pass-through credits post-resolution
Subcontractor Delivery Delays
Context
Creative subcontractor consistently missing deliverable deadlines.
Steps
- 1.Build dossier of missed deadlines with impact on client timelines
- 2.Escalate to subcontractor leadership
- 3.Invoke penalty clauses or request capacity increase
- 4.Prepare backup vendor for critical deliverables
- 5.Amend contract terms for future engagements
Quick Wins
Start with these immediate actions:
- Create a vendor dossier template for documenting issues
- Map out vendor escalation paths (support → TAM → exec)
- Review contracts for pass-through credit clauses
- Set up vendor performance tracking dashboard
Related Playbooks
Want to automate this playbook?
DigitalCore tracks these metrics automatically and alerts you before problems become crises.