We believe SPM is important but a subset of a wider SRM approach and there will be a small subset of suppliers and partners that you want to partner with where the focus on things other than performance measurement like mutual go to market opportunities and innovation development.

I think you will find if you read the report we haven’t defined SPM ‘far too narrowly’ more we were trying to make the point that procurement often ‘don’t get’ the collaborative value of SRM (nor do they often have the skills to capture the value) and default back to a measurement type relationship (SPM) which is ‘one way’ rather than collaborative because that is what we as an industry are used to doing. For example think RFP evaluation as example of the measurement skill set we foster in procurement.

We agree with your points about “Tracking supplier compliance against contract terms is not SPM, however. It is just one tactical part of SPM. The purpose of SPM is to obtain a result, which is reducing risk and improving performance. Understanding supplier performance is more than ensuring that requirements are met and should involved a two-way flow of information”. We were not saying that compliance to contract terms equals SPM, but you have reinforced our point of companies / people missing the point about collaborative value.

You will also note that within the report we spoke to a number of CEO, CFO’s and COO’s globally and they implicitly understand the value of strong partnerships (or SRM relationships) and do consider it a priority, in fact they consider it vital to the successful delivery of their organisations strategies. What we did find was that we in procurement do a terrible job at ‘selling’ the value of our involvement in SRM/Partnerships and investing SRM as a whole.

We’d be more than happy to share the report with you or any of the readers interested if they wish to send an email to enquires@stateofflux.co.uk.

Kind Regards

Alan Day