In yesterday’s post, we turned our attention to supply market intelligence which, as the maverick points out, is critical as much for supply risk as it is for value creation. But, as we also pointed out in yesterday’s post, despite the plethora of options, finding the intelligence you need can be difficult. All sources have strengths and weaknesses, so you need to be selective to achieve success. Where should you start?

Suppliers

• financial statements: if the company is public, they must release a reasonably sufficient level of information for a sound financial assessment
• customer interviews: if you really want to find out how good a supplier is at providing a product or service, ask a customer!

Internal Sources

• performance reporting: gather all the hard metrics you can!
• internal stakeholder interviews: any data they have is real company intelligence data

External Sources

• price index data: and roll your own forecasting!
• research services: which collect data relevant to your needs
• blogs and social media: which offer unsolicited third party opinions and reviews
• public consumption data: from government contracts and import registries which allow you to understand supply vs demand dynamics

This data will give you a mostly factual, relatively unbiased third party picture of the market and supplier performance in the market. All you need is a platform that can automatically gather, consolidate, project, and advise on it all.