Supplier Performance Management

Integrating Supplier Quality and Supply Chain Risk Management

Supplier performance management is a critical initiative in supply chain governance for organizations dealing with multiple suppliers. The globalized manufacturing and sourcing mantra has made companies focus on their core competencies and outsource the rest of the non-core business to suppliers across the globe. Companies in service industry such as banking, financial services and IT have also started realizing significant advantages in sourcing good and services from multiple suppliers while benefiting through improved pricing and enhanced services. Companies are becoming highly dependent on their suppliers and have to assess and manage their supplier's performance to reduce business risks and revenue losses.

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For manufacturers High-Technology, Pharmaceutical, Energy, Automotive and Construction industries, this becomes even more important as they spend on average 50%-80% of the total product cost on raw materials and parts procured from multiple suppliers across different parts of the world. Manufacturers with a large or mission-critical supply chain are working on strategies and techniques to gain cost advantages by efficiently managing their suppliers, without sacrificing quality and flexibility.

Supplier performance management can help companies have better visibility into supplier deliverables and offer benefits to uncover and remove hidden cost drivers from poor quality, increase competitive advantage by reducing order cycle times, chargebacks for non-conforming material and supplies, gain insight on how to best leverage their supply base, and align practices between themselves and their suppliers.

Supplier Performance Management Process

Supplier Performance Management is a critical component of the entire supply chain governance and integrates with supplier quality and supply chain risk management processes. It includes critical processes to define, measure and control supplier performance to meet business goals.

An effective Supplier Performance Management system addresses the following:
Supplier Management

• Define key suppliers in the supply base
• Define and create contracts for goods and services from suppliers
• Link suppliers with the contracts for performance management against contracts
• Define quality, financial and operational metrics in the contracts

Supplier Performance Measurement and Management

• Define Service Level Agreements for contracts
• Define metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) for contracts
• Manage the certification status and compliance requirements of their suppliers

Evaluating Supplier Performance through Scorecards and Supplier Rating

• Evaluate and measure supplier performance through supplier scorecards
• Generate executive dashboard reports for entire supplier base and supply chain performance

A proactive organization should integrate supplier performance scorecards with real-time data to measure and identify key supplier related events, which could impact business operations and revenue. Supplier quality events such as supplier corrective actions (SCAR)/root cause analysis, supplier audit findings and customer complaints should be linked with Quality KPI in scorecards to enable a real-time quality score for suppliers. Furthermore, scorecard metrics and KPIs should be well integrated with loss and supplier risk management functionality allowing users to define multi-level thresholds and weighting for every risk. Real-time integration of supplier scorecards with supplier quality and risk management events will enable companies to give supplier ratings and generate executive reports such as top performing supplier for quality score, suppliers with poor score for corporate social responsibility, highly innovative and cost efficient supplier etc.
An effective supplier scorecard system for supplier performance measurement should use data based on real-time information, allow weighting of their various components to determine an overall score, providing trending information on the supplier's performance over time, and enable comparison to other similar suppliers that server the company.