CIPSA Supplier Evaluation Training

I recently attended a one day training course in Sydney on Supplier Evaluation.

The course was organized by CIPSA (the Chartered Institute Of Purchasing & Supply Australia & New Zealand) and targeted at supply managers. I was keen to pick up a lesson or two to sharpen my skills in the area of supplier evaluation.

Key Learnings

Some of the key points stressed in the course included:-

• Whether evaluating potential or existing suppliers, it is essential to have in place a robust process

• A basic first step is to identify evaluation criteria - which should form the benchmark against which performance is assessed. Suppliers should always be evaluated against the identified benchmark rather than against each other. It is more important to identify how well suppliers are meeting the identified objectives, rather than how well they are performing against each other

• While cost is likely to be an important evaluation criteria, it should not be the only criteria. As was noted, “If the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem becomes a nail”!

• Evaluation criteria should be prioritized to reflect relative importance

• Ideally, the evaluation criteria used to assess an ongoing supplier should be linked as closely as possible to the evaluation criteria used to select the supplier in the first place

• It is essential to involve key stakeholders within a company when developing evaluation scorecards. It can be useful too to involve suppliers

• Implicit to the whole process of evaluation is that all team members should be involved in the evaluation scoring.

Upgrade your toolkit

If all this looks deceptively simple in theory, it can be more difficult to execute well in practice witihout the right tools.

You may well need purpose-built software to help your team put into practice what the training courses preach!

Author: Derek Groom (Decideware)