Supplier management is a central success factor

The supply of products and services from external sources is a central pillar of corporate management. The goal of strategic supplier management is to ensure that these resources are available under optimal conditions through an efficient procurement process. This makes the development and implementation of all measures to control, plan and regulate the supplier base an important success factor. For supplier management, 5 process steps are particularly relevant.

Supplier identification

At the beginning, it is important to analyze, structure, and classify procurement goods and sources. This creates transparency about your category groups and suppliers. This allows you to derive a strategy and develop appropriate action alternatives. For example, expanding the supplier base. In this case, the use of IT tools may be useful.

Risk assessment of suppliers

By implementing risk management at an early stage, you can identify critical factors such as supply shortages, quality issues, or compliance violations in a timely manner and take early corrective actions. To achieve this, gather information on business operations and the implementation of sustainable corporate management practices as part of the supplier onboarding process.

Supplier evaluation

Evaluate your suppliers based on strategic and operational criteria. On the one hand, cooperation with specialist departments can be important, while on the other, processing information from IT systems (e.g. warehouse management systems) can be critical. This allows for criteria such as delivery reliability or quality to be directly recorded. For survey-based evaluation of relevant stakeholders, the evaluation criteria questions may need to be adjusted depending on the use case.

Supplier development

You can either develop existing suppliers further or discover new ones. The measures to shape the relationship with the supplier are derived on the one hand from the strategy of the category group (dual sourcing, framework agreements) and on the other hand from the profile of the supplier (performance quality, risk profile).

Supplier integration

The integration of suppliers into your operational activity. By doing so, you optimize communication, involvement in internal business processes while avoiding dependencies, as well as transparent controlling of the contractually agreed scope of services.

Supplier management is central to business success in the ongoing evolution of international supply chains and the development of regulatory requirements.