Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence: A Guide to Meaningful Metrics and Successful Results

Understanding supplier performance is vital to ensuring a well-functioning supply network. This how-to book will help you develop and implement an evaluation process to help you reduce costs, lower risk, and improve both the performance of your company and your suppliers.

This practical text includes examples of best practices that companies are using to evaluate suppliers and illustrates how to get beyond collecting data for the sake of data to achieving real results. It shows how to get at the meaning behind supplier metrics, and choose measurements that are meaningful both in the context of your goals and also for the supplier. Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence helps you get at the root causes of supplier problems that even suppliers may be unaware of and enable them to make high-impact improvements.

Many firms do not know where to begin in the supplier evaluation process, what ways would work best, or even what kind of results they want to get. They know that they should be measuring supplier performance, but may not understand why or what they would gain from it. This book is geared toward managers at two types of companies: those who know that they should be measuring supplier performance but do not know where to start, and companies who want ideas about how to improve or revitalize a current program.

Key Features:

• Details the business case for supplier evaluation; where to start; what to measure; how to develop an evaluation process; strategies and approaches to supplier evaluation; and how to get from performance measurement to performance improvement
• Categorizes the supply base to determine which suppliers to focus performance measurement on and what types of measurement is appropriate for different categories of suppliers
• Outlines a process for developing a supplier evaluation program from overall strategy to execution
• Discusses how to get from evaluation to action and presents supplier development approaches with examples of successful measurement strategies
• Illustrates different approaches to understanding return on investment and positioning strategies for supplier evaluation to get management support for the process

About the Author

Sherry Gordon is President of Value Chain Group, a supply management and performance excellence consultancy. She is a pioneer in enterprise measurement and process improvement techniques. After the acquisition of her previous company, Valuedge, she became Vice President, Supplier Performance at Emptoris, a leading provider of enterprise supply management software solutions. Valuedge’s supplier assessment software became part of Emptoris’ software suite. Before founding Valuedge, she ran the New England Suppliers Institute (NESI), a non-profit organization focused on improving customer-supplier business relationships and on using lean enterprise practices to improve supplier performance. Sherry has worked for manufacturing and distribution companies as well as management consulting firms. She is a frequent speaker on enterprise performance improvement and supply chain topics. Mrs. Gordon has a B.A. from University of Michigan, an M.A. from Columbia University, and an MBA from Simmons Graduate School of Management.