Category Archives: Supplier Management

Does Your Supply Chain Have An Audit Trail?

A recent article in Industry Week on “Lessons Learned from High-Profile Product Recalls” had a number of good tips on what to do to prepare for a recall before it happens, but one tip in particular stood out. Specifically, the need for audit trails. Every risk management article these days talks about being prepared, identifying key stakeholders and information requirements, developing communication plans, preparing reverse logistics and fulfillment operations, and evaluating risk vs. cost, but few point out the need for good audit trails down to the component, and sometimes raw material, level.

Without a good audit trail, if a serious defect is discovered across a product line, or one or more food products you are selling is tainted with E. Coli or salmonella, you will have no choice to recall the entire product line because you will have no way to trace the defect back to the source and forward to only the affected units. For example, if all of the tainted soup cans came from a cannery in Michigan, then there is no need to recall the cans from Nebraska and Georgia. And if all of the overheating batteries came from one plant in China, and they were only used in two specific lines of laptops, and you have six, at most you will be recalling one third of the units.

So make sure you can trace each product back through each supplier, component manufacturer, and, in the case of food products, each grower. Otherwise, when a recall does happen, it could be financially devastating.

Can You Really Afford to Ignore 20% of Your Supply Base

A recent article over on the CPO Agenda on how “Procurement Success is a Two-Way Street” noted that a recent Efficio grassroots survey found that almost two-thirds of respondents never met with 20% of their suppliers. Now, there are some suppliers, like office supplies vendors, that you never have to meet with because the organization is only using them to source readily available commodities where supply outstrips demand and where another vendor is waiting for the business down the street, but do these types of suppliers really constitute 20% of the supply base? Not likely. I have to agree with the author in that this is a recipe for potential disaster. Considering that, thanks to the recent downturn, small suppliers can often go from financially viable to bankrupt in a matter of weeks, or days (as all it takes is one of their key customers to go belly up), failure is always just around the corner.

In addition, a lack of regular communication keeps the supplier in the dark about your needs, and if the supplier is not aware of projected future demand spikes sufficiently in advance, the supplier may not be able to plan its production schedules accordingly, and you might be left with egg on your face as the company’s hottest selling SKU goes out of stock.

This isn’t to say that you need to meet with each supplier regularly. If the supplier is not critical, or demand predictable and easily communicated in advance, you can simply meet on a quarterly basis and establish a methodology where you push information out to the supplier on a regular basis. But if the supplier is critical, at the very least a status update call should be occuring on a bi-weekly basis just to make sure there are no gremlins in the gears. And make sure communication is agile and happens quickly when something changes, for better or for worse.

For some tips on agile communication, see how “Procurement Success is a Two-Way Street”.

Enlisting Suppliers to Create Competitive Advantage


Today’s guest 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.

Feedback is a familiar term to most people, and its principles can be found in many aspects of business. For example, some supply management departments regularly request “feedback” from their internal clients as well as from their supply base. Sometimes this is done formally, with a predetermined list of questions about performance in the past year; sometimes it is done informally. Asking the right questions, and acting upon the feedback, are important elements of improving your performance.

A complementary concept is “feed-forward.” Feed-forward, as opposed to feedback, is a proactive approach. Based on its origins in the technical world, feed-forward watches for and monitors changes in the environment, as a way to anticipate process changes that may be required in order to maintain a desired level of performance. From a business application perspective, it tends to focus on a desired future state, and identifying ideas to help create that future state.

Next-level organizations are interested in both feedback and feedforward insights as one avenue to creating competitive advantage. One way to accomplish this is through a carefully-constructed and executed “Supplier Satisfaction Survey.” Interested to learn more? Take Greybeard’s Supplier Satisfaction Survey.

What’s the Secret Sauce to Good SPM?

SupplyChainBrain recently published a piece by APQC that outlined 10 Steps to designing an effective supplier relationship management program. It had some good tips, and was dead-on when it said that successful programs have four major components — methodology, collaboration and supply chain synchronization, technology processes, and measurement and rewards — but it overlooked the fact that not all components are created equal.

Methodology, Technology, and Measurement are all necessary conditions, but without collaboration, none will be sufficient. But collaboration is not an instant cure. As the article states, strategic relationships require time, trust, mutual understanding, regular and consistent communications, and mutual commitment to establish a long-term relationship. Collaboration will make the difference between good results and great results, but the great results won’t happen over night. They will only happen after the relationship has had time to simmer. Collaboration is the secret sauce, but it’s not a sauce that can be brought to a rapid boil and served.

BravoSolution: Making Spend Analysis More Useful to the Average Supply Management Professional, Part II

In yesterday’s post we discussed how, for one reason or another, spend analysis is not used enough in the average organization. But, as I said before, this doesn’t have to be the case. Spend Analysis can continue to deliver value year over year if it is properly integrated into daily supply chain activities. And the key to making this happen in your average Supply Management organization is integrating spend analysis not only into the (e)Sourcing process but the e(S)ourcing suite.

In BravoSolution’s Collaborative Sourcing Suite, Spend Analysis is integrated into the Contract Management, Compliance (& Spend) Management, and Performance Management solutions and will be integrated into Risk Management in the next version of the solution that is currently under development. In todays post, we will discuss the benefits of integrated spend analysis and what is available in BravoSolution’s suite.

By integrating Spend Analysis into the Contract Management solution, BravoSolution assists an organization in achieving a global view of sourcing and spend. From day one, an organization can not only track the contract details, but can track forecast data (total spend, cost reduction, demand management, etc.) and spend on an on-going basis by business unit and time-period (by setting up the periods for which spend is to be tracked). Then, on a regular basis, current and forecast saving reports can be (re)run with the click of a mouse button. For selected contracts, the actual savings report will summarize forecasted spend, actual spend, spend variance, expected savings (to date), actual savings, and variance, and the forecast savings report will summarize cost reduction, demand management, process savings, cost avoidance, cost increases, and total savings.

By integrating Spend Analysis into the Compliance Management solution, and matching all the way down to the unit level to find variance from contracts, Spend Analysis can help the Supply Management organization quickly pinpoint negotiated savings leakage and stem the losses. More importantly, the reports can be configured to report leakages and variances by supplier and contract (against the contract value and invoiced cost). If the variance calculations factor in discounts, rebates, and pricing tiers, then actual losses can be quickly computed. Then the recovery process can begin. BravoSolution’s suite, which includes integrated messaging for supplier performance tracking and hooks into performance management, includes the ability to track amounts paid and overpaid by supplier and contract to assist in recovery.

By integrating Spend Analysis into Performance Management, not only can spend be tracked by supplier, but spend can be broken down into high, average, and low performing suppliers. These reports can be high-level, based upon overall performance scores, or by individual KPIs from supplier scorecards. In addition, trends can be analyzed and the organization can determine whether spend to high performing suppliers is increasing, holding steady, or decreasing and whether or not action has to be taken. These trends can be plotted or (spider) graphed automatically, and benchmarks can be built and tracked over time.

And by integrating Spend Analysis into Risk Management, Risk Management can be taken to the next level. But that’s the subject of a future post.

So how successful can you be if you integrate Spend Analysis into Contract Management, Compliance Management, and Performance Management? Theoretically, the sky’s the limit (as spend analysis is now doing more than just measuring spend). Practically, the results are looking very promising. While BravoSolution only finished the initial integration of their core suite components with Spend Analysis last year, BravoSolution’s first four case studies are looking quite promising.

After an initial 3 month roll-out to a handful of advertising and marketing groups in a large media organization, the organization decided to roll out the contract and compliance management solutions to all 30 of its global groups. A second organization was able to get 50% of its spend in a compliance program in less than six months. A third organization was able to develop a performance management solution that it could roll out to thousands of franchisees to determine the appropriateness and effectiveness of its global contracts. And while the final savings numbers won’t be known for a while, the savings are tracking in the range enabled by High Definition Sourcing, 10% to 30%.