Vendor offboarding is the practice of removing a vendor's (virtual and physical) access to your systems, data and corporate infrastructure. Once the contract is terminated, the vendor is effectively relieved of performing the obligations it had been under while the contract was still in effect.

No one person in the organisation can be held solely responsible for offboarding vendors. While the procurement manager might hold overall responsibility, you will likely involve your legal team for their contractual know-how, your finance team to ensure all final payments are made, and your security personnel to ensure that appropriate safeguards and controls are in place.

Proper offboarding is a lot more involved than closing out the books on a vendor contract; There is the matter of transfer of data, deletion of data, revoking access, etc. An effective methodology would be to "reverse engineer" the onboarding process for off-boarding.

Terminating a vendor relationship prematurely can incur considerable costs unless the vendor breaches a specific provision of the contract such as the Service Level Agreement (SLA). In which case, you may issue a notice to 'show cause' for termination, henceforth requiring the vendor to give reasons why the contract should not be terminated.

Not necessarily, no. There are several reasons an organisation may choose to discontinue their contract with a vendor, including but not limited to the following: the end of the contract term, breach of contract conditions, or project completion. Occasionally, a company may also take years to realise they have not had use for the services of a particular vendor they have been contracting.

We recommend starting the process early (well before the contractual term comes to an end) so you have ample time to search for the appropriate alternative and choose the right vendor that meets your requirements.