Building a Supplier Scorecard

In talking with senior vendor management executives we've realised many organizations find it difficult to develop strategic supplier scorecards.

While there's a high level of comfort with scorecards for transactional suppliers, it's the measures of partner-like, high value and complex relationships which seem to pose greater challenges.

We've seen our clients take various approaches to the task.

One is the idea of building a scorecard from the 'bottom-up', ie

• Start with Tangible metrics that are so familiar, eg quality, PPM, lead times, etc 

• Develop metrics to understand and improve the business Relationship - some of these will be qualitative, eg do they understand our business?, level of trust, commitment to strategic alliance, etc  

• Go to the next step to define measures of Financial Value - eg price metrics, return on assets & investment, etc 

• Then address the critical Strategic Drivers, eg Delivery of continuous innovation, Creation of competitive advantage, New market penetration, etc. 

In thinking about what our clients would find useful, we scoured the available published resources of experts in this field and compiled a selection of what we think is some of the of the best advice on how to develop Best Practice Supplier Scorecards.

For a copy of Best Practice Supplier Scorecards, please email me at: mailto:blog@decideware.com

Author: Richard Benyon