Streamlined Supplier Review Management

Why I Built Vendoro

I have spent more than 16 years working in logistics and procurement in some of the most difficult places a supply chain can operate. Yemen, mostly — a country that has lived through a decade of war, displacement, and man-made catastrophe.

I have worked with the UN World Food Programme distributing food to families who had nothing. I have worked with FHI 360 coordinating WASH and health supplies to communities with no clean water. I have worked with Mercy Corps, Action Contre la Faim, and Solidarités International, always at the field level, close enough to the problem to feel it.

In those environments, procurement is not paperwork. It is life-or-death coordination.

A supplier who delivers late to a remote distribution site in Yemen isn't just missing a deadline. He is leaving a mother and her children waiting in forty-degree heat, wondering if the aid will come. A vendor who supplies substandard goods to a field clinic isn't just failing a quality check — he is putting a nurse in an impossible position with nothing to work with. And when a service provider goes silent mid-crisis, it isn't a communication issue. It is a gap in the chain that nobody can see from out of country.

I saw this every day. And I noticed something uncomfortable: there was no reliable, shared way for field teams to warn each other.

The institutional knowledge was trapped. And when staff turned over, which happens constantly in this sector, the knowledge walked out the door with him.

Meanwhile, procurement tools in the private sector were built for corporate buyers: weighted matrices, financial scoring, complex KPI dashboards. Useful in an office. Overwhelming in the field.

One evening in Aden, I was sitting in my car reviewing a delivery I had ordered on Amazon. Without even thinking, I tapped through the rating: five stars for speed, three for quality, five for communication. Done. Accurate. Shared. Useful to the next buyer.

And I thought: why can't we do this for humanitarian suppliers?

Why do we overcomplicate something that field staff already know how to do instinctively? Why do we make the person who just finished a sixteen-hour day managing a food distribution fill out a multi-page evaluation form?

The answer was that nobody had built the right tool for the right person. Every procurement system I had used was built for compliance officers and finance teams. Not for logistics coordinators in conflict zones.

So I built Vendoro.

Four factors. Five stars each. The same questions every field logistics officer already asks after every delivery, out loud or in his/her head — I just gave those answers a place to live.

Delivery Speed — Did they show up when they said they would?
Quality of Goods or Services — Was what they delivered actually usable?
Communication — Could you reach them? Did they keep you informed?
Cost Efficiency — Given the context (the location, the urgency, the market), was the cost fair?

That is it. And the ratings are tied to a country, tied to a location within that country, because a supplier who is reliable in Aden may be a risk in Taiz or impossible to reach in Marib.

The platform is built for the logistics officer who does not have time for spreadsheets. It is for the procurement coordinator who wants to warn a colleague three countries away about a vendor that looked good on paper. And it is for the new staff member who simply needs to know whether a supplier has ever been used in this region before, and what people thought.

It is not built for headquarters. It is built for the field.

If you have worked in Yemen, Sudan, Syria, or South Sudan or other similar places and wished there was a simple, honest way to share what you know about the suppliers around you, Vendoro was built for you.

— Mazen Al-Sakkaf Logistics Manager, Humanitarian Operations Professional & Founder of Vendoro, Yemen