A colleague of mine, Sandra Gauvin, an expert in the quality field and writer of the Current Quality blog and newsletter, recently brought to my attention a new disturbing trend in supplier evaluation: suppliers who charge their customers to for the privilege of conducting an on-site audit. In this scenario, a customer contacts a supplier requesting [...]
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In the pursuit of cheaper shoes, yet infinite variety, shoe companies and fashionistas seem to have gone awry. Recently I went to the “Shoe Mega-Store” at Marshalls to look for a pair of new business-y shoes. There was certainly no lack of quantity or variety of shoes. The Mega Store was really mega. But [...] Attracted by the potentially high cost savings and the direct impact on the corporation’s bottom line, some firms plunge directly into strategic sourcing activities without first fully understanding their spend. While they will probably achieve cost reductions, these firms are not reaping the full rewards of strategic sourcing and these savings may be short-lived. Why? Firms [...] I was reading the recent blog post at the Spendmatters: Beyond Shedding the Deadweight in Procurement and Operations. Instead of just cutting headcount, particularly in procurement, Jason Busch suggests other ways to approach cost reduction. Among the suggestions are: driving better efficiency by fully using software solutions in the Procure-to-Pay cycle; using third [...] My previous post about why supplier scorecards fail generated a lot of interest. So today I’m going to write about one of the biggest reasons for failed supplier scorecards: There is little or no action or follow through that results from the scorecards. Supply managers get so focused on the idea of having a [...] The failures at Peanut Corporation of America are tragedy in every way. This supplier failed to meet both regulatory and customer requirements. Its customers failed either to uncover or report the failures, and people died as a result. Now a healthy, everyday product is suspect, and faith in the U.S. food processing industry has [...] I was recently interviewed by Nick Zubko, Purchasing Editor at IndustryWeek magazine, for an article on supplier scorecards. The resulting article, “Who’s Keeping Score?”, summarizes the actions needed to ensure supplier scorecards that are meaningful and actionable and is available online and in the February 2009 issue. To summarize the key points, the article explains that companies need [...] As the saying goes, statistics can be made to prove anything – even the truth. Or, everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise (Bertrand Russell). The customer sends the supplier its monthly scorecard. Wait, the calculations seem completely wrong. We did better than [...] In the benchmarking world, one of the axioms is to “steal shamelessly” from other companies, meaning: don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from others (not steal proprietary information). When it comes to supplier performance metrics, one of the first questions firms ask is: What metrics do others use? The idea is the borrow supplier [...] |
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