Today’s post is from Robert A. Rudzki, President of Greybeard Advisors LLC, who has (co-) authored a number of acclaimed business books, including Beat the Odds: Avoid Corporate Death and Build a Resilient Enterprise, On-Demand Supply Management, and the supply management best seller Straight to the Bottom Line.
A supplier representative visits your offices and begins to talk about “the partnership” between your two firms. You hadn’t realized the relationship was that comprehensive, so you ask him to describe the exact nature of this partnership. Chances are that the answer you receive will be rather wordy and nonspecific, about what you would expect from a “glad-handing salesperson.”
“Partnership” is one of the most overused and misused terms in the world of business. When I was a CPO, we dealt with this phenomenon by taking two steps:
(1) our Procurement Council developed a written definition of what we meant by the term “supplier partnership”
(2) once we had that definition, we decided how to put it to good use to improve both our internal and our external processes
If you’ve never done the exercise of developing your own written definition of supplier partnerships, I would encourage you to do so. It has several benefits. It will help you organize your ideas about this important subject. Also, you can create a common understanding within your company regarding what the partnership term means and how it should fit into your overall supplier selection and management process. And finally, it can serve as an excellent point of discussion with your suppliers — especially those who say they want to become your partner.
We did this in my corporate career as a CPO, with real benefits. We went so far as to print our short definition of supplier partnerships on the back of our business cards. When meeting a supplier for the first time, we pointed out the definition on the back of the cards and used this as a launching point for a discussion that often proved to be very meaningful.
Thanks, Bob!