Taking steps to measure the performance of suppliers is essential to ensuring an efficient and well-functioning supply chain. If you take a lean enterprise view of supply management, you will discover a few things. For example, the supply chain is full of hiding cost drivers and waste. On a global level, supply management is full of risks. This is because companies are now dealing with a growing number of offshore suppliers. Measuring and fully understanding supplier performance is essential to creating a well-functioning supply chain. It’s also necessary to maintain a company’s competitive position. The end goal of these evaluations is to improve the performance of critical suppliers.

Benefits of Supplier Performance Evaluation

Companies that take time to evaluate suppliers discover improved visibility into supplier performance. This is achieved by reducing inventory and order cycle times. They also reduce risk, remove hidden cost drivers, and increase their competitive advantage. These evaluations also help companies gain more insight into leveraging their supply base. This allows them to align the practices between the company and the supplier. Learn about the specific benefits offered by the supplier evaluation below.

Increase Performance Visibility

If a company is unaware of how suppliers are performing, supplier management is usually based on guesses. Also, just measuring performance can help improve it. The improvement is often even more dramatic if companies provide more business to suppliers meeting the set performance goals.

Avoid Supply Chain Disruptions and Risk

Businesses must become familiar with the third-party vendors that are part of their supply chain. This allows them to put measures to help prevent interruptions and reduce the potential of risk exposure. With supplier performance management, you receive in-depth visibility into risks posed by suppliers in the supply chain network. This results in a business adapting to preventative measures to help reduce or eliminate any risks that may impact supply chain operations in the future.

Find and Remove Cost Drivers and Hidden Waste in the Supply Chain

All supply chains are full of inefficiencies. Some are improved with better communication between suppliers and businesses. Others occur because of supplier poor business practices that result in increased inventory, higher costs, slow deliveries, and quality issues. A company can reduce wasteful activities and expenses caused by supplier glitches. Examples of these include:

• Extra freight charges
• Additional inspections
• Overtime (to catch up)
• Obsolete inventory
• Safety stocks
• Purchasing from several sources (this reduces the effectiveness of price leveraging)

Remember, time is money. When you measure and improve the supplier performance and reduce quality problems, you eliminate wasteful steps in your processes. Also, by better understanding the performance of suppliers, you can help them drive inefficiency and waste from their business. This results in lower costs and higher quality suppliers.

Improve Overall Brand Reputation

The actions of a single, subpar supplier can negatively impact the brand image of some companies. This is another area where supplier performance evaluation and management are invaluable. When you leverage supplier management solutions, you can track your supplier’s performance against your KPIs. This allows you to enact the necessary corrective actions quickly. Over time, this will help improve your brand reputation.

Leverage Your Supply Base

When you measure supplier performance, you can create a supplier threshold that leads to improvements. You can also better plan for new services and products when you understand suppliers’ capabilities and performance levels. Also, local understanding suppliers helps determine if they can reduce total costs to ensure they outperform the offshore suppliers being used. Suppliers can also offer technologies to customers to help with the development of new services and products. This adds revenue to their customer’s bottom line while enhancing their competitive position. This allows customers to add more value to the top line while removing costs from the bottom line.

Align Supplier and Customer Business Practices

In a perfect world, suppliers would operate their businesses to align with customer needs. This includes sharing the same business ethics, commitment to improvement, similar standards of excellence, and more. Consider any high-performance system or the lean enterprise. The goal is to drive higher quality, lower prices, and shorter delivery times. A supplier doing this is going to harm those who aren’t. If a supplier isn’t accustomed to ensuring continuous improvement, they may not keep up with the customer’s growing requirements for faster, cheaper, and better services or goods.

Mitigate Risk

Insight into the supplier’s performance and business practices reduce business risk. This is especially true as more companies grow more dependent on critical suppliers. Risks could be operational and financial, increasing as the geographic distance grows. A risk area of increasing concern is the performance of the sub-tier suppliers that the prime supplier doesn’t have any knowledge of or contact with.

Increase Efficiency with Supplier Management

There’s no room for second-best when it comes to a business’s suppliers. Issues related to the supplier will eventually cost the company, so using a performance rating for each supplier is such a smart move. Evaluating the performance of each supplier not only helps you see which ones are ideal for your business but also allows you to weed out those resulting in excess waste or costs. We offer the tools and technology to help you with this process. Additional information about rating the performance of suppliers can be found by contacting us.