There are a number of tools that are essential to use in vendor management meetings. You need to have terms of reference for each meeting, meeting agendas and meetings reports.
Terms of Reference
These are the rules for the meeting like who attends, meeting frequency, the number of days that the minutes should be sent out to the attendees following the meeting and the number of days a the meeting report should be delivered before the meeting. Terms of reference may be included as a draft document in the contract or they can also be drafted on transition in.
Meeting Agenda
The meeting agenda may already be in the contract but should also be adapted as the engagement matures especially for operational and executive level meetings. For contract level meetings the agenda will usually be the same since you will always discuss SLAs but you may want to expand this agenda to as the relationship grows.
Meeting Report
A standard template report can be established for each meeting type. For operational meetings you can start out with the scope of the services as defined in the contract. These reports will evolve over time.
All of the these tools will help with better meeting set up and running.