Supplier Relationship – 4 easy way to improve
Ignoring Supplier Relationship could shatter Supplier-Buyer bonds. A positive relationship between Supplier and Buyer is must to maximize value from business interactions.
Why a sound relationships with supplier’s matter so much for successful procurement?
Why You Need to focus on Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)
- It promotes collaboration between manufacturers and suppliers that ensures long-term benefits of both the party.
- To ensure that quality and inventory needs are fulfilled at optimum cost.
- It promotes supplier to be a part of our innovation journey to keep us competitive in the market.
- The partnership creates a sense of trust and accountability and that makes supplier commitment in fulfilling our orders, even when things get tough around.
- Suppliers can help us to know the best practices in the industry, what materials to use, the latest innovations, and the best production techniques and improvements suggestion that make our product better.
To get the thinks done from a supplier, good business relationship plays a vital role. It motivates suppliers to understand specifications better, quickly respond to changes, reduces total life cycle costs, minimizes risk and obviates disputes, helps to improves compliance and helps us to deliver on time and approved budget.
Just to know the importance of suppliers, imagine for a moment that a company lost all its suppliers. The business could theoretically come to a full halt.
The better we work together with our suppliers to improve the supplier relationship, the healthier our company’s outsourcing will be.
There are a many easy strategies that would help us to improve our supplier relationship. In fact, most of them involve simply being human and treating others the way we would like to be treated.
1. Keep in mind that supplier’s goals are different than ours
The supplier’s goals and organization goals are competing but that should never be the reason to have competitive supplier relationship. We as a Buyer wants to place the order at a lowest price possible but our supplier wants to get the order at the highest possible price.
So we agree on somewhere between. The process of achieving common ground should be human, not an egotistical argument. We have to think our supplier, or the supplier’s representative, as a human being. It will make a considerate supplier relationship and will help the supplier to like us and therefore agreement could be more in our favour.
2. be in touch with your suppliers frequently.
Face time with supplier provides a good opportunity for high-level discussions. This brings more trust in the relationship. Trust means we will have priority access to their stocks. That mean supplier will give our suppliers more priority than our competitors. This improved supplier relationship may also get priority in Credit terms or more flexible payment terms, that improve our company’s cash flow.
3. Believe in your supplier as a team player.
When we think and treat our supplier as a partner, rather than just some company to do business with, our supplier may be more inclined to brainstorm and offer suggestions that are more customizable and value added for our organisation.
4. Convey issues to supplier on time
Do realise that there might be an issue at our end. So, don’t just jump to blame the supplier or every failure. Supplier relationships can suffer quickly if we are unaware that there is an issue on our end.
We must communicate the issues to supplier as early as possible. Waiting for a supplier to fix an issue on their own generally don’t give results rather it breed resentment on our side. Convey the vendors quickly and directly if there’s something they need to fix. Correctly said, If we have to refer to the contract terms, we are already late to do anything about it.
Conclusion
A pleasant Supplier relationship is vital because, over time, a lasting relationship between us and our suppliers allows free-flow of feedback and ideas from both sides. Over time, this will create a more efficient and effective supply chain that will have a encouraging impact on supply quality, costs and delivery to get better and better customer service.