1.Reduce the supply base
-Reduce the number of suppliers for each commodity of purchases to a minimum, a few or often only one.
2. Develop strategic long term partners
-Develop supplier partners, especially in the commodities key to the company’s growth and future success.
-Plan and execute for a long term relationship and exchange information.
3. Manage supplier with commodity teams
-Involve cross functional teams for strategic issues with key suppliers.
-Above will help in considering total cost than immediate price in purchase decisions.
4. Certify suppliers
-Create and use a certification process that challenges suppliers and make them proud to be certified.
-Ensue that the certification process contains the criteria important to your company.
-Recognize certified suppliers publicly.
5. Connect to suppliers with Internet Technologies
-Exchange data pertaining to quality, schedules, engineering change, prototypes and pilot runs, return goods, order status, capacity planning, etc.
-Customize web page for key suppliers.
6. Collaborate with suppliers
-Make buying decisions based on total cost of ownership.
-Inform suppliers as soon as new orders arrive.
-Eliminate incoming inspection.
-Buy complete, tested subassemblies.
-Let suppliers choose where to buy components from an approved list.
-Give incentives to companies to locate their plants nearby to reduce delivery time and encourage frequent , small daily deliveries.
-Train and help suppliers to be compatible with their production systems.
-Certify suppliers and eliminate incoming inspection.
-Let suppliers choose where to buy components from an approved list.
7. Outsource for right reason
– Focus on ore competencies and outsource the rest.
-Purchase completed assemblies, tested and reedy to go on the assembly line.
-Allow suppliers to participate in design and subsequently build and test assemblies.
-Provide suppliers drawings, blue prints and other information quickly.
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