What are the reasons for our increased focus on, and the growing importance of effective supplier management?

There are two key drivers for this.

• The growing realisation that effective management of the supply side of the business can provide real productivity gains as well as reducing complexity, time and costs.

• The increasing use of outsourcing in many businesses. More and more companies are making the decision "if it is not a core business activity, let's outsource it". Outsourcing as a key element of business strategy is becoming more important.

What are the implications for managers?

Strategic sourcing, legal and risk assessment functions are involved in the setting up of formal contracts with key suppliers. However, the management of the contract is the responsibility of the functional manager. Very often this person is used to managing to manage an in house team - now they have a contract manager role, responsible for managing an external supplier.

This involves.

• Supplier relationship management
• Supplier performance management
• Managing strategically key services in the case of managing outsource suppliers

How can we contribute to the training and development of people in a supplier management role?

We have experience in working with many organisations in manufacturing, business services, banking and other functional service sectors on supplier management projects.

Typically these organisations have outsourced a number of key services including.

• IT
• Telecoms
• Pensions
• Payroll
• Facilities Management

Using this experience and our established framework, we can design and deliver a customer designed learning programme for people in your business involved in supplier management.

• We can develop a programme around the supplier lifecycle. Using this frame we can focus on the areas of the supplier relationship most significant for your managers

• Whilst we will custom design a programme, there are a number of topics that we would expect to cover

Tools & Models

To provide you with additional insights into how we approach the subject of supplier management, below are some of the tools and models we use.

• The "Outsource Supplier Selection" Checklist - This generic model can be adapted by managers to their specific supplier relationships. It is designed to provide a framework for potential outsource supplier selection

• Constructing a SLA (Service Level Agreement) which both parties can commit to involves a lot more than telling the supplier what they must do! The seven stage plan will help construct SLAs that work.

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