On his purchasing.com blog, Richard Weissman asked a question that was so simple and direct yet so thought provoking that I had to repost the question and my response here.<\/p>\n
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Richard writes \u201cImagine that you found a magic lamp and a genie appeared. Rather than Barbara Eden, it was a supply chain genie. (You can pick your own image at this point.) Anyway, this genie gives you one wish: \u2018If you could select the trait of the perfect supplier, what would it be?’\u201d<\/p>\n
I replied that \u201c[t]here\u2019s so much we all expect from our suppliers that it is hard to distill it to one wish. So to overgeneralize, my response is\u2026 A commitment to keep its promises.\u201d<\/p>\n
And, if you think about it, without broken supplier promises, purchasing jobs would be much easier. Because we can be skilled at gathering market intelligence, sourcing, qualifying suppliers, negotiating a great deal, writing an iron-clad contract, and measuring supplier performance but, if our suppliers fail to keep their promises, then we can still be pulling our hair out at the end of the day.<\/p>\n
Yes, it\u2019s up to us to use our skills to identify and predict the suppliers most likely to keep their promises. But there\u2019s never truly 100% certainty that there won\u2019t be a hiccup.<\/p>\n
When you think about how important the keeping of promises is, I think that our side (purchasing and supply management) needs to keep our promises as well. This may mean forgoing that reverse auction after the second year of a three-year contract.<\/p>\n
Because if we can\u2019t keep our promises, we\u2019re going to have a harder time attracting a supply base that always will.<\/p>\n
And, for the sake of both our blood pressure and the success of our companies, we need a supply base that keeps its promises!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On his purchasing.com blog, Richard Weissman asked a question that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n