Vendors Inventory and Attributes

Applications are among the most significant things vendors supply to the enterprise. The Applications Inventory and Attributes is published and available. The connecting relationship is the Vendor attribute on Application records, which references the Vendor Semantic ID for the vendor that supplies, licenses, or maintains each application. The Vendors Inventory reflects this relationship in the Related Applications attribute, which is derived from the Applications Inventory.

When this relationship is well-governed, APM can answer vendor-level application dependency questions with precision: which applications would be affected if we exited this vendor relationship? Which vendors supply applications with no viable alternative? Which application rationalization candidates are supplied by vendors already under exit planning? These questions determine the feasibility and cost of portfolio decisions before commitments are made.

The relationship is bidirectional: the Applications Inventory carries the Vendor attribute identifying the supplying vendor; the Vendors Inventory carries the Related Applications attribute listing all applications sourced from the vendor. Maintaining both sides of the relationship ensures that the Enterprise Model graph is traversable in both directions.