Innovating Supplier Collaboration
Nothing gets done without supplier collaboration. As a professional in the supply chain business, you know all too well that there is not a single industry in the world that can survive without establishing and maintaining a solid relationship with suppliers.
Whether it’s a restaurant having regular discussions about the best seasonal produce from its greengrocer, or an enormous globe spanning ecommerce corporation which needs vast quantities of packing materials for its often-oversized cardboard boxes (not naming any names), all businesses need suppliers.
However, even in this most basic and fundamental of business relationships there is room for innovation.
Encouraging Dialogue
When a business needs to cut costs in its procurement division, the old method would have been to get stuck in with some aggressive negotiations and essentially bully the supplier into lowering its prices for fear of losing a valuable client.
However, this method doesn’t exactly invoke feelings of collaboration and can lead to a souring of business relationships and can cause harm further down the line. For example, if your business needs some last-minute supplies, your supplier may be more or less inclined to make a special delivery based on how they’ve been treated in the past. In other words, it can be the difference between receive a basic level of service, or an exemplary one.
Enter the facilitator! A facilitator acts as a mediator between suppliers and procurers and encourages meaningful communication where both sides can lay out their goals and pain points and, ideally, reach a position where each party feels they’ve been listened to and, with a little compromise, achieved their own objectives.
The idea behind such facilitation is to make suppliers feel like part of the team and therefore more likely to work with your business rather than against it.
AI, Imaging, and Analytics
One of the most exciting new supplier collaboration innovations this author has seen recently uses artificial intelligence and digital image capture to create more efficient and rapid methods of communication between manufacturers and suppliers.
These platforms can capture images of a new product at each stage of prototype assembly and automatically create blueprints and data streams for suppliers to view. This allows said suppliers to immediately begin working on strategies and capabilities to provide the necessary components for when the new product goes into full production. Once the product is in production, the same platform can help suppliers and procurers can identify process issues and provide evidence for the causes, as it produces images of each unit as it’s being built in real time. It can also be used to create a data record system which can help suppliers meet regulatory requirements and protect themselves against downstream poor-quality claims by customers.
Most importantly, these tools reduce lag time between procurers and suppliers and help source products and components in a more effective and efficient way than would have previously been possible with face-to-face meetings (usually with a pile of blurry photos or diagrams scribbled on napkins) or chats over the phone.
Final Thoughts
Supplier collaboration is an area ripe for innovation and, whether it’s coming up with new ways to improve negotiations or exciting technology which transforms the way products are brought to market, the field is only limited by the imagination of those working within it.