Abby Burton is the manager of the IT vendor management organization within Neiman Marcus, managing the MSP program and another internal CW program. Recently, she also took management of the infrastructure project delivery team. Partnering with the HR and procurement teams has enabled her teams to be in the know early in the vendor engagement process, which ensures the IT contract manager and security teams are engaged. Neiman Marcus’s CW program boasts an average of 1,000 contingent workers at a time in the IT sphere, and they manage SOW within the VMS. Burton’s ability to communicate the program benefits to non-IT leaders has resulted in organic growth and increased scope of the program.

In the most recent fiscal year, the MSP program, paired with internal service level agreement governance, resulted in over $1 million in savings back to IT. Burton’s other accomplishments include creating a self-service contract lifecycle tool for Neiman Marcus leadership, bringing visibility to over 1,000 contract documents in the past year, and standardizing contract language, resulting in faster contract execution. In addition to all this, Burton’s team has integrated the VMS with an access provisioning tool, which enables workers to perform meaningful work on day one and provides a positive contractor onboarding experience.