May 2012
S M T W T F S
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Getting Senior Management Support for SPM

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 [...]

Where’s the Beef……From?

A recent article in the Manchester Guardian reported on the latest sub-tier supply risk horror story. It is alleged that British supermarket chains Tesco, Asda, Marks & Spencer and dozens of other supermarkets may be inadvertent parties to a different kind of laundering scheme – beef laundering. Greenpeace, after a 3-year undercover investigation, called [...]

It’s the Customer, Stupid

I recently wrote a post for the Spend Matters blog, “12 Reasons Why Supplier Scorecards Fail” (updated, with one additional reason than my original post  on this site in December 2008). There were some insightful comments, including one about the customer’s role in supplier performance success. Rob Handfield made a pertinent comment that it [...]

In a Supply Chain Failure, a Bad Workman Blames His Tools

The latest victims of the economic downturn seem to be suppliers in the electronics supply chain. As reported in the May 18th WSJ article “Clarity is Missing Link in Supply Chain“, as business began to contract, Best Buy dramatically cut back their forecasts to electronics companies such as Toshiba just before the holiday season last [...]

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 [...]

Borrowing Supplier Scorecard Metrics

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 [...]

Supplier Scorecard Metrics — Easy vs. Meaningful

In my last post, I listed 11 reasons why supplier scorecards fail.

I’d like to write about the first reason – measuring what is easily measured instead of measuring what is meaningful or important. This assumes that you already know what is important for your company to measure, but that’s a future topic. 

Let’s look [...]

11 Reasons Why Supplier Scorecards Fail

Scorecards have become the Holy Grail of supplier performance management.  I find that most companies have some kind of supplier scorecards. And if not, they are in the process of developing them or want to develop them. Expectations for results are high. However, very few firms are satisfied with either their scorecards or the results [...]