The Inovis Blog

I was sitting at a sushi restaurant eating lunch on Friday when I saw what would have angered me profusely during my restaurant management days post-college—a delivery truck arriving at noon during the lunch rush. This was a strict no-no, and we would refuse shipment and throw not only our day off but the delivery guy as well. We actually tracked our vendors on this and other factors on sheets of paper; and tracking the good and the bad. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were tracking supplier performance. And we actually used it to not only make us more efficient but help our suppliers as well in a semi-collaborative process!

For instance, if they brought us a delivery outside the norm for something we needed, or if our rep grabbed something from the warehouse we forgot and brought it to us, major good points. But, working in a bbq restaurant and them mislabeling a box of ribs and giving us pigs’ feet was a definite strike against, since we didn’t notice until a busy Friday when we were about to cook them. We used these notes at times to decide who to order from. Also the deliveries during lunchtime were strikes against. When the rep came calling on us for more business, we gave them the “well, let’s look at how you have done for us” routine, and haggled over price and reliability from there.

I read an article recently that also made me think about this in Supply Chain Management Review called Enhancing Supplier Performance Management for More Profit, Less Risk. It also made me think of my days in the restaurant business, and how we used our rudimentary system to track supplier performance to base business decisions on, but at my level (Assistant Manager) I never thought of the monetary consequences of vendor management. Selecting your vendors and tracking them should be a requisite for any business. The money you could save and how efficient you can be are just a few of the perks of such a program.

Now, all this is gravy, but it is a two way street. This needs to be either a collaborative process or you will find yourself looking for new vendors every few months. They can’t meet needs you don’t tell them about. The more suppliers and buyers work together, the better the results. Using a Performance Management solution helps automate vendor scorecards and allows a buyer to let non-performing vendors know their issues, as well as congratulate good vendors. Email notifications, daily worklists, dashboards and automated tasks give you all the visibility you need into your vendors’ performance to make finding and fixing problems a breeze. Making your company more efficient and saving you money.