One thing that I would like to expand on from ap962’s post is assigning a dedicated vendor manager. It is good to have a single person designated as the contact person with a vendor in order to avoid sending the vendor an overwhelming amount of emails. I once was involved in a project that included sending information requests for components that were used in our products. Multiple engineers were emailing the same suppliers requesting similar information, and the supplier became annoyed with the amount of emails he was getting from our company. The project involved hundreds of components, and it was decided to try to redistribute the components to the team in a way that only one person was dealing with a single vendor.