A recent guest post over Spend Matters by Andy Kohm, founder of VendOp, provided 4 reasons why supplier scorecards don’t work, which is a terribly inaccurate and a disservice to the procurement space because
- They Do Work if done right and
- what he was describing was internal vendor surveys, NOT scorecards.
Even worse, if he had said internal vendor surveys don’t work, SI would have totally agreed and hailed the post because, frankly, internal vendor surveys don’t work. Expecting enough people to fill out enough long surveys to get statistically reliable data when everyone is overworked, underpaid, and tired of doing everyone else’s job (because no one has time to do their own) is just ludicrous. It’s not going to happen, and when it does, the data and answers are not going to be that good or reliable because the surveys will be filled out in a rush. And all the reasons provided by Mr. Kohm will hold true.
But you see, a scorecard, at least a proper scorecard, is not a survey, or a summary of soft, qualitative feedback survey scores, but a summary of hard, quantitative metrics built up from hard data over time. A scorecard summarizes hard performance metrics, KPIs, and unarguable (undisputable) incident counts, not subjective scores on reliability.
We have to remember that just like anchoring can be a problem in negotiations, it can be a problem in subjective ranking. If the last couple of interactions with the supplier were problematic, the recipient is likely to fill out a fairly negative score even if the 20 interactions before that were great and, overall, the supplier is batting 800. Similarly, if the last few interactions were particularly good (because the supplier knows their review is coming up and making extra effort just to score enough to pass), the recipient may rank the supplier very positively even though 8 out of 10 requests are ignored on average. In short, for reliability, surveys suck.
But hard scorecards, built on on time statistics, reject rates, incident counts, billing accuracy, and so on are unbiased, anchored in fact (and not fiction), and work. They allow both parties to zero in on true issues, problems, and disagreements, and work collaboratively to fix them. They are the best supplier relation management tool the average organization has at their disposal and should not ever be discounted. Proper scorecards are the solution, not the problem.