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5 "aha" moments in supplier performance management

Sometimes it pays to state the obvious. Here are some insights into managing supplier relationships and supplier performance that you may have heard. Maybe you don’t even agree. But to me, they are essential to understanding how to improve supplier performance.

1. Treat supplier like peers, not subordinates. As it turns out, customer firms don’t [...]

Here’s a Classic: Why Supplier Scorecards Fail

I’ve spent more brain cells than I care to think about on supplier evaluation and supplier scorecards. I’ve made a number of posts about the subject on this blog, which I will list in a future post.  And I’ve been a guest blogger on the subject. As part of its Best of Spend Matters [...]

Managing and Improving Supplier Performance in a Lean Environment

I am in Covington, Kentucky attending the AME International Lean Conference, Journey to Greatness. Attendance is excellent despite the economy and its adverse impact on other conferences this year.  This may be due to various lean journeys presented by practitioners and couldn’t be more relevant in a down economy.  AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence) [...]

What KPIs Should You Use to Measure Supplier Risk?

With supplier bankruptcies a daily occurrence, to say that the topic of supplier risk has become hot is an understatement. The challenge is what to do about it.  Someone recently asked me whether there are any KPIs you can use to measure supplier risk. There are, but developing those KPIs is a business process [...]

New Podcast: Measuring Supplier Performance

Many people are looking for advice about how to create supplier scorecards specifically and how to measure supplier performance generally. 

Listen as Sherry Gordon is interviewed about measuring supplier performance by Sandra Gauvin, Editor of Current Quality newsletter.

In this in-depth interview, you will learn:

Why you should measure supplier performance How to figure out what to [...]

For Supplier Scorecard Success: Develop a Process

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 [...]

Got scorecards? Now what?

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 [...]

Giant performance failure in a peanut supplier

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 [...]

Knowing the score

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 [...]

Scorecard Statistics — do you get what you measure?

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 [...]