I have had several instances where I’ve had to deal with vendors and our project team has had to work on choosing the appropriate vendor. The initial steps in dealing with the situation are setting up meetings with different vendors. One key aspect of larger companies is that they usually have approved vendors, therefore you must meet with them even if you are interested in other vendors for your specific project. The approved vendors list is usually easier to deal with since they have been through the checks required by the company, while on-boarding an unapproved vendor can increase the cost and timeline of your project. For a project we worked on we ended up going through an unapproved vendor and had to audit their facility to ensure regulatory compliance and that the practices were acceptable by our company standards. This audit and company checklist were some of the methods utilized to ensure that the we receive that best product, however it did have the drawback of significantly increasing the timeline of the project. The biggest issue with vendors is usually communication as the vendors do have multiple clients at times certain vendors can have communication lapses which cause project delays and uncertainty on receiving certain material. For example we had communication lapses with a vendor that creates our surgical mesh, which we needed for prelim studies on another project that was being worked on. The vendor was requested to send certain batches of this mesh for the experimental protocol and at first they delayed the shipment by about 3 weeks and when it did finally arrive it was the wrong batch. These types of issues with vendors essentially drive cost and time of projects to increase.