Given that the state of most supply chains is still chaos, and may be for quite some time, if you don’t know, maybe you should find out!
How? Benchmark your current supplier management performance against more than 800 global organizations that participated in the 2022 State of Flux Supplier Management survey at this link (and receive a free maturity benchmark analysis for your organization).
The reality is that supplier resilience, the foundation for supply chain resilience, is becoming more important than just about any other kind of resilience as a business without the products to sell or operate is not a business, and if its suppliers are not resilient, it won’t have any sources of supply … and will not be able to operate.
That’s why, once a an organization has implemented an e-Procurement core and a sourcing core, if it has any supply issues, it should tackle SRM as soon as possible in wave 2 (and this can be done simultaneous with implementing the analytics core — after all, it’s good to have supplier data to crunch on). Plus, SRM supports end-to-end source-to-pay processes when done right, as explained in the State of Flux research publication front-material that brings you best practices from over a decade of research.
The research report, which reviews their six pillars of supplier management:
- Value
- Engagement
- Governance
- People
- Technology
- Collaboration
Also provides you with a four-phase action plan to guide you through your four-phase supplier management journey. At a high level, the journey is to:
- Explore the opportunity … with a value opportunity diagnostic
- Create the business case … by fleshing out the value proposition
- Setup and run … with supplier management in real time
- Scale and grow … and achieve ROI
And this is something you want to do as leaders significantly outperform on each of the pillars even compared to “fast followers” …
In a later post we’ll dive into a few of the findings, but for now, if you’re having problems (and you are), and you’re not sure how well you’re doing against peers, take the benchmark, download the report, and start planning for supplier development — even if you aren’t ready to implement a custom solution as all P2P or e-Sourcing platforms can support the basics of supplier management, and the reality is a platform isn’t a solution without a process and trained people to follow it. (And keep your eyes peeled for the State of Flux 2023 research survey which will be launching soon … responding early gets you the results early, and leaders in this space are in the best position to win!)