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Supplier performance management: new article

There’s a new article on the eSourcingwiki, Understanding and Improving Supplier Performance. The wiki paper is also available for download on this page. It’s a good overview of the benefits and process of supplier performance management. If you haven’t read my book yet, this article provides an overview of some of the key concepts in it. In general the eSourcingwiki [...]

When measuring supplier performance, it’s how well, not how many

Recently I was asked about how many suppliers are typically monitored and measured, on average, using a supplier performance management (SPM) system or solution and whether there is a best practice. I have never come across a best practice in terms of numbers of suppliers to measure.

I know of one large company that was measuring 1200 suppliers [...]

Download a book chapter from Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence

Subscribers to the Value Chain Group site may now download Chapter 1 of Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence: A Guide to Meaningful Metrics and Successful Results. This download includes:

Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Chapter One  — Introduction, including why the book was written and the business case for supplier performance management

The book has been praised by its [...]

Choosing good supplier performance metrics

I’ve discussed previously how supplier performance metrics work best when they are aligned with and support overall corporate goals and strategies and reasons why they can fail. But the challenge remains of how to tell whether you’ve come up with a good metric.  There are many ways to look at a metric to judge how effective it [...]

Take the survey: What’s happening in SRM business practices?

Last year I read with great interest about the results of the Supplier Relationship Management survey done by State of Flux, a procurement and supply chain consulting firm in the UK. The headlines about the results stated that companies were confusing supplier performance with supplier relationships.  The 2009 survey found that companies were largely monitoring supplier performance and were not [...]

Top Ten Reasons to Implement Supplier Performance Management

At the end of the year, and especially at the end of a decade, many top ten lists are popping up. So I’m joining in this list-making with the top ten reasons why firms should implement supplier performance management (SPM).

Find out how well suppliers are really performing
Improve supplier performance such as quality, responsiveness, customer satisfaction and delivery
Reduce [...]

Smart Supply Chain Move or The Turning of the Screws on Machinists?

Boeing recently announced that it was planning to replicate all 787 parts built in the Puget Sound area in a new facilities being built in North Charleston, South Carolina. According to a recent article in the Seattle Times,  Boeing machinists are seeing this as the first step toward moving all parts out of Boeing’s Puget Sound plants. The [...]

Too Many KPIs: Rightsizing the Supplier Scorecard

You’ve heard of supplier rationalization and “rightsizing” the supply base. What about too many KPIs on the supplier scorecard? I’ve mentioned the problem of measuring too many KPIs in previous posts. In 11 Reasons Why Supplier Scorecards Fail, I list measuring too many KPIs as a reason for failure. In Supplier Scorecard Metrics: Easy vs Meaningful, I [...]

Feedback about Supplier Performance: Is Anyone Listening?

In the past couple of months I wrote two guest posts on Spend Matters about an independent  cycling trip that I went on in France. In the first post (An Uphill Battle with a Poor Supplier), I described how the tour company rented us supplier-provided bicycles  that were in less than top condition, ill-fitted, missing air pumps and having other mechanical [...]

A Supplier Development Advantage

I recently gave a workshop on supplier evaluation in a lean environment as part of the AME Lean Conference. Because the attendees of my workshop already had a working knowledge of lean principles and practices, they were quite different from many audiences I have presented to and interacted with on the subject of supplier evaluation and supplier [...]