Value Chain

Supply management, procurement and quality professionals are increasingly aware that they should be measuring their suppliers’ performance and working with important suppliers on performance improvement. In their enthusiasm for going forward with these initiatives, some people make some errors that can impede or stall progress. Here are a few mistakes people making when trying to [...]

Many people struggle with getting senior management support for supplier performance management initiatives. And, according to the editor-in-chief of Supply Chain Digest in his July 2nd editorial, many people don’t even know what senior management support means.  Most know that you’re supposed to need it or you might not get very far with implementing supply [...]

In a survey of  223 procurement, supply chain and supplier relationship management by the consultancy, State of Flux, almost two-thirds said that they did not have a definition of Supplier Relatinonship Management (SRM) in their companies.  The conclusion of Alan Day, Managing Director of State of Flux, a supply chain consultancy in the UK, was [...]

In a recent poll conducted by Supply Management, more than half of buyers (55%) have experienced problems introducing suppliers to e-procurement systems. But the other 45% did not. What was the difference? How the new technology was communicated to suppliers. While some buyers used carrots and others used sticks, which typically worked if nothing else [...]

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 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 the [...]

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 an [...]

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 supplier [...]

My new book, Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence: A Guide to Meaningful Metrics and Successful Results, has just been published this week. This is my first experience as a book author (although I did publish a shorter e-book in 1999 on Improving Company Performance Through Supply Chain Management Practices). The book is available through the [...]