Decideware

Purchasing.com offers a profile of successful efforts by Hewlett-Packard to improve their Supplier Management Process.

The article features comments by Operations Director at the Houston based Personal Systems Group, Tom Adams on how he focussed on a key objective of the program "to build partnerships with suppliers"

Critical to the program are two scorecards

Adams explains how the High Performance Supplier Scorecard enables HP to measure supplier performance and encourage positive behaviors, such as continuous improvement.

And, the Supplier Reverse Scorecard aims to ensure suppliers want to do business with HP by gathering honest feedback which is used in continually developing HP's supplier management business practices.

HP offer 10 Tips to 'Getting Useful Supplier Feedback':

1. Agree to formal and informal feedback from suppliers

2. Formal feedback can occur meeting with suppliers - such as monthly with strategic suppliers, quarterly with partnership suppliers and annually or semi-annually with transactional suppliers

3. Informal feedback can take place on a much more regular basis (even daily), via phone calls, emails and personal interaction

4. Consider designating an executive sponsor/champion to each strategic supplier, who talks with suppliers frequently and provides opportunities to share informal feedback

5. Create a formal process to assess supplier feedback. The first step should be to determine if the idea is worth pursuing. If so, come up with appropriate actions, and arrange for a team to work on those actions

6. Change may involve not much more than tweaking an existing process, not completely restructuring it

7. Respond to the supplier to let them know you are working on their idea

8. Implement the actions. Then provide the supplier with a way to provide feedback on the change

9. Be sure to get back to suppliers if you decide not to take any action on their recommendations

10. Finally, keep the whole process in perspective, remembering that it is designed to continue building stronger supplier relationships

Source: Purchasing.com & Hewlett-Packard

From Adversarial to Co-operative - How to Improve Supplier Relationship Management Practices

A recent article in SupplyManagement.com, 8 May 2008 highlights the supplier management journey of UK infrastructure provider Network Rail and makes the point that change is achievable with good leadership.

Following criticism of its previous supplier management policy, characterised as adversarial in nature and failing to properly address a balance between risk and reward, the head of contracts and procurement, Ian Ballentine committed to change in the organisation and said he wanted the group to improve the company's approach towards suppliers.

"There are elements of adversarial behaviour," he said. "You do see aggressive behaviour arise when things are not going well.

"Where we see it we will use training to get people to understand there are other ways of delivering a project rather than banging on the table and saying, 'I need my project today'."

Graham Coombs, communications director at supplier membership organisation the Railway Industry Association, said it was a positive step for the sector. "There is no doubt in the days of Railtrack [Network Rail's predecessor] that it was highly adversarial. It has been changing ever since. We are not quite in a fully co-operative environment, but we are moving in the right direction," he said.

Source: SupplyManagement .com