Buyer Web Tool

A Supplier Strategic Status is a label. This label shows how much this supplier complies with your business criteria.

There are 6 (six) different Supplier Strategic Status:

• PANEL: The supplier fulfills all your business criteria.

• AUDIT: The purchasing department is currently investigating if the supplier fulfills your business criteria.

• LOCKED: The supplier do not fulfills your business criteria. An action plan is (or will be implemented) to solve this issue.

• TO BE ELIMINATED: The supplier do not fulfills your business criteria and an Exit plan has been (or need to be) defined.

• ELIMINATED: The supplier has been eliminated of the Supplier List.

• REJECTED (only for Potential Suppliers) : The Purchasing Dpt. refused the access to the Supplier List.

Usually the perimeter of a Supplier Strategic Status is the Supplier Generic Name, but in other cases, the perimeter can be:

• the Supplier Site or
• the Supplier Site Technology
• or/and a Sub Supplier Technology.

The 'Supplier Technical Status' is measuring the technical capacities in general.

We can define 3 different "Expert Level'.

EXPERT: an 'expert supplier' can help you to define the functional specifications, propose solutions and participate in design. He is autonomous and responsible for his processes and designs, he will manage and design complete sub-assemblies.

DESIGNER: a designer supplier design complex items based on your functional specifications with full design and process responsibility.

MANUFACTURER: a manufacturer is responsible for its own processes. This supplier do not take in charge design responsibilities.

There are several methods to evaluate the supplier quality.

In this post I list the most relevant.

1 ) Quality Certifications

2 ) Audit Form

3 ) Audit Visits

There are 6 main criteria to check when evaluating a supplier :

a) Quality Certifications

b) Business Requirements

c) R&D Resources

d) Competitiveness

e) Quality Level in Mass Production

f) Production

We recommend that you fix 3 levels for every criteria : Preferred, Acceptable, Unacceptable.

In some cases you can define the frequency of measurement for the criteria : weekly, monthly...

We start now a difficult subject.

First, I would like to say that you have several choices.

a) You can buy several 'theological' books about this subject (400 pages each) and spend several weekends reading it.
b) Or you can pay a (very expensive) expert during several days to learn things you already know.
c) Or you can do a (very expensive too) training to learn things you already know.
or
d) You can give me an opportunity a read this post.

One day, long time ago, my boss (at that time) demanded to me a presentation (obviously power-point) with 'your purchasing strategy in my portfolio'. I recognize that I came back to my desk completely lost. Ten minutes later I came back to see my boss.