When it comes to running a growing business, you want to make sure that your suppliers are providing you with consistent, top quality products. There are a number of simple ways you can ensure that your supplier keeps high-quality products coming your way. Here are three of the most important steps to follow.
Quality Assurance
The first thing you will want to do is make sure that the products your supplier provides are always top quality. You can check the quality of your supplier’s products by making occasional test sales. Also, you can perform inspections of the manufactures that the supplier works with. Finally, you can check with other companies on the supplier’s client list to see how they feel about the supplier’s service. It is important that these quality assurance steps are performed on a consistent basis.
Manage Supply Chain
To ensure that your supply chain is the best it can be, you will want to consider utilizing a contractor pre-qualification process. With a pre-qualification process, you will ask the contractor a number of questions that include their past experience, their monthly volume, their delivery speed and their list of manufactures. In addition to these general questions, you will want to ask questions specific to the supplier’s location. For instance, if your supplier is located in China, you will want to ask about their delivery capacity during the Chinese New Year. Also, ask if the supplier can handle specific volume demands. Finally, you will want to maintain consistent contact with the supplier so you can inform them of changes to your own business.
Create a Supplier Rating Scorecard
It is important to make sure that you know what your supplier is doing right and what it is doing wrong. To help you better evaluate the performance of your supplier, you will want to create supplier rating scorecards. You will want to use two scorecards. The first score is used by your employees to evaluate your suppliers. The second score is sent to your suppliers to help communicate your evaluation of the supplier’s performance.
You can easily manage the consistent performance of your supplier by performance quality assurance, managing the supply chain and using supplier rating scorecards. By staying on top of your supplier’s performance, your business will be able to consistently deliver top-quality products, making you and your customers happy.
