Very often we hear about Customer Satisfaction, less often we hear about Supplier Satisfaction.
That is because, although we know that the supply chain is the backbone of every valuable business, we mostly still think in client customer relationship standards.
With the evolution of the markets and with the always increasing requirements in terms of quality, reliability and sustainability of the supply chains that cannot longer be true.
The supplier needs to feel part of something and valued for its contribution to the bigger picture.
A supplier that feels encouraged and taken care of will be much more willing to support actively changes as well as challenges than one that is left aside and is contacted only when need be.
Multinationals will go a step further and try to establish strategic partnerships with their most critical vendors.
To start the process that will conduct to a valuable relationship with the suppliers first the actual position needs to be assessed,
Voice of the Supplier (VoS) surveys are a good instrument in order to understand where every supplier is positioned towards a benchmark, to evaluate the general sentiment and at a later stage to improve supplier satisfaction.
VoS surveys are questionnaires that are sent to all suppliers and measure various internal items like for example payment attitude, reliability, commitment, etc. and are constructed based on Likert scales (from 1 to 5 how much do you agree…). This kind of scales allow to obtain actionable data based on singular views.
The VoS should be distributed to the vendor’s staff that is daily working with the buyer’s organization and that is therefore able to effectively evaluate that very organization, absolute anonymity is a top priority for a VoS since the more secure the staff feels the more reliable will the answers be. Ideally an external consultant should take care of collecting the data.
The so obtained data have to be translated into KPIs and have to become the basis for action plans aimed at improving the critical points. Ideally the process has to be repeated over several periods and the changes have to be tracked in order to also evaluate the effects of the actions taken.
If analyzed over multiple periods the results can also be put in relationship with the supplier’s performance over the same period of time, this would allow an even deeper understanding of the effects of the efforts put into the relationship.
Suppliers performance is one of the base elements for a company’s success…
Fulvio Villa
CGE Advisory Board Member, Italy and Germany Representative