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Vendor Problems That You Can Easily Avoid
Originally published Wednesday, Mar 01, 2017
Vendors can be hard enough to find and qualify but maintaining a stable supply while meeting high quality standards over time can be just as challenging. Even when you’ve found the right suppliers, building a relationship and everything that goes along with it is a sure cause of headaches.
While there are many challenges for multi-vendor management, there are three very solid indicators that a company should seriously consider evaluating the performance of key suppliers, renegotiating contracts or even evaluating ties with some of them.
Failed Inspections:
When it comes to vendor inspection issues, the recurring cases are sometimes difficult to spot because usually procurement has very little to do with the Quality Control process but being able to view failed inspections over time will give a unique perspective into which aspects of the agreement the vendor is falling back on.
Postponed Shipments:
It’s difficult to get suppliers to do what they promise! That seems to be the only constant. When a vendor postpones shipments it causes a backlash all the way back to the customer and your organization ends up losing credibility.
Cancelled orders:
This is similar to postponing except when an order is cancelled, finding another vendor in a short period of time can be a real headache. Sometimes it will even cause the item to be marked as Unable to Source which may be another metric to keep an eye on.
All you need to do to be able to avoid these problems is to keep proper track of the flow of the information and keep up-to-date records to evaluate performance and negotiate contracts as needed.
