Want to improve? Ask your supplier
Filed Under Blog
We often talk about continuous improvement in the supply chain. Often that involves auditing your suppliers, with them learning from the findings and putting actions in place to make them an even better supplier.
However, there is a different way of looking at it. What would happen if
you asked your supplier to audit you as a buyer? How would you fare?
I guess we’d all agree that we want to become the priority customer the one when we say jump the supplier asks how high? But that means that you need the right relationship and unless you are spending gazillions with the supplier developing that form of relationship will take time. Part of that is learning how to best make the relationship tick.
By asking your supplier to provide an insight into your connection you’ll likely gain critical insight into issues that are affecting your effectiveness as a buyer, harming your buyer/supplier relationship and more importantly helping to drain cost.
Following this approach can be a difficult and sometimes bitter pill to swallow. We all like to be thought of as super effective and it can be difficult when we find we’re not but if we’re trying to find methods to improve asking a few simple questions of our suppliers, about us the buyer can be super insightful.
So, we’ve agreed on the method, what questions should you ask? Each business is unique but there’s likely to be some common ground with a mix of transactional and communication issues that can be teased out. We’ve put together 20 questions below. With some of these the answers might hurt, but let’s face it we can’t improve if we don’t know.
1/ How well do I manage the relationship
2/ How well do I understand the parts I order and key issues such as lead times and key cost drivers.
3/ How do I treat Risk
4/ Do we communicate effectively?
5/ Do I listen to and understand your problems?
6/ What could I do better?
7/ Do you feel our sourcing process is effective and fair?
8/ Do you have sufficient access to other stakeholders in my organization?
9/ How well do I manage change?
10/ Are our transactions always clean and efficient?
11/ Do I understand the complexity in your supply chain?
12/ Am I open to new ideas?
13/ Do I clearly articulate my requirements?
14/ Do I share appropriate KPI information?
15/ Are our KPI’s representative of our relationship
16/ Does the way we manage our transactions result in large amounts of rework
17/ Do I understand what your business does?
18/ Am I your best client? if not why not?
19/ Am I open to new ways of doing things?
20/ If you could change one thing about our relationship what would it be?
OK, so there are some zingers in their that’ll hurt, but you get the idea.
Teasing out information from our supplier can help both organizations prosper?
So what do you think? Do you ask your supplier for feedback? Any thoughts on our questions above? We love your comments so please make sure you fire back in the section below.