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Some people are heaving sighs of relief that Chrysler is emerging from bankruptcy in the arms of Fiat and that GM is officially in bankruptcy soon to emerge as leaner and meaner entities. However, many are left holding the proverbial bag. Who are they? The unsecured creditors who are lining up to salvage whatever [...]
Recently I wrote about suppliers who charge their customers to conduct an on-site audit. The desire to charge stems from the fact that site visits are time-consuming and resource-intense for suppliers. Many suppliers have to host multiple site visits and particularly the smaller suppliers, find them disruptive to their [...]
In an interview in the IFPSM ezine, Bernt Ejbyfeldt, senior vice president of purchasing at Volvo Car Corporation, was asked whether Volvo planned to provide financial assistance to help its struggling suppliers. Ejbyfeldt said that Volvo wasn’t in a financial position to make loans to help its suppliers. So he suggested that suppliers help [...]
Companies embark on supplier scorecards for many good business reasons. They are concerned about supply risk, supplier quality, supplier responsiveness. They know that they should be measuring, understanding and improving supplier performance and mitigating risks. It’s the right thing to do. But as I’ve mentioned before, companies are often focused on the metrics themselves [...]
I was recently interviewed by business columnist Jamie Herzlich over at Newsday for an article she recently wrote, “Small Business: Choosing the Right Supplier.” (May 14, 2009) Many businesses are struggling with the challenge of how to choose the right suppliers. According to Ms. Herzlich, many business owners are unaware of what to look [...]
I was recently following a discussion on Elsmar Cove, a forum for quality professionals (free, but registration is required), on the subject of an approved supplier list (ASL). Someone wanted to know whether having an approved supplier list was a “shall” under ISO standards and whether you had to evaluate every single supplier for [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Robert Handfield’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “United They’ll Stand,” promotes the idea of working with financially-stressed key suppliers to avoid pushing them over the brink into insolvency. The author is not advocating bailing them out, as suggested by Debbie Wilson’s in her post, Vendor Vulnerability – Handfield’s Flawed Recommendation. But rather, [...]
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