An IT department isn't an island. A mid-sized company routinely has 15 – 30 suppliers: hardware (Lenovo, HP), software (M365, Atlassian), telecom (T-Com, Orange), service contractors (helpdesk outsource, monitoring), security (antivirus, SIEM). Each has a contract, support tier, expiry date, and contact. Without a system this lives in a spreadsheet last updated by a colleague who left two years ago. GLPI has Suppliers and Contracts objects built for exactly this.
Suppliers: the supplier catalogue
Under Management → Suppliers, create a record per supplier. Fields:
- Name — trading name (e.g. "Lenovo Slovakia s.r.o.").
- Type — category (Hardware, Software, Services, Telecom). Useful for reports like "how many hardware suppliers do we have".
- Address, contact details — address, phone, email, website.
- Tax number, VAT — for accounting.
- Account, payment terms — bank details, payment terms.
- Documents — attachments: GDPR DPA, NDA, MSA.
Suppliers can be linked to inventory objects (Computer, Software, Network device) via the Items tab — creating an auditable "this server came from Dell" link.
Contracts: contracts with expiry alerts
Under Management → Contracts you model the actual contractual relationship. Fields:
- Number, name — reference, e.g. "CONT-2024-007 / M365 E3 enterprise agreement".
- Type — Service contract, Software license, Hardware support, Maintenance.
- Supplier — link to the Supplier object from the previous section.
- Start date, end date — contract validity.
- Renewal periodicity — auto-renewal (1 year, 3 years, manual).
- Notice period — termination notice (e.g. give notice 90 days before expiry if you want to cancel).
- Cost — total price, currency, payment cadence (monthly/quarterly/yearly).
- Items — linked HW/SW objects covered by the contract.
The most valuable feature: Alerts on contract end in Setup → Notifications. The GLPI cron regularly checks whether any contract is approaching expiry (e.g. 90 days ahead) and sends a notification to the responsible person. No contract ever gets forgotten when renewing — or, more importantly, terminated in time when you don't want to renew.
Vendor SLA vs. customer SLA
GLPI has two kinds of Service Level Agreements that shouldn't be confused:
- Internal/Customer SLA — your IT team's commitment to end users (P1 in 4 hours, P2 in 8 hours).
- Vendor SLA — the vendor's commitment to you (Lenovo NBD support means next-business-day swap, M365 99.9% uptime).
Vendor SLAs are recorded in the contract's Service hours and Support hours fields. On a ticket linked to an asset under a contract, the technician sees: "This server has NBD support until 18:00, call Lenovo helpline 0800-XXX-XXX, contract ID 5556677". Without that, the technician spends 30 minutes hunting for which contract covers the server.
Practical rollout
Steps for standing up vendor management:
- Contract inventory — collect every active contract (from Excel, paper, the procurement officer's mailbox). Goal: a list.
- Create Supplier objects — one record per company in GLPI.
- Create Contract objects — one record per contract, linked to its Supplier.
- Link contracts to assets — the Items tab on each contract. This is work, but only once.
- Set up alerts — Notifications for contract expiry 90 and 30 days ahead.
- Update process — when a new supplier or a contract change comes in, always update GLPI first, before filing it away.
For a mid-sized company with 30 contracts that's a 1 – 2 week project. Once done, it saves dozens of hours a year hunting for support phone numbers, expiry dates, and conditions.
Contract reporting
Built-in dashboards and saved searches surface: total vendor spend split by type, contracts expiring in the next 90 days, the percentage one vendor represents of total IT spend (vendor lock-in indicator), and the number of assets without an attached contract (potentially unsupported). These reports live in Tools → Reports and can be scheduled to email the CFO or IT manager regularly.
Limits — when you need more
GLPI vendor management isn't a full procurement system. It lacks: advanced tendering, multi-vendor RFP, automatic cost reconciliation with the ERP, capability matrix for vendor outsourcing decisions. For those needs, dedicated tools exist (Coupa, SAP Ariba, Jaggaer). But for the operational record of contracts and contacts that the technician can rely on during an incident response, GLPI gives you exactly what you need — in the same system you already use for tickets and assets.