A tip of the hat to Benjamin Benulis at Silicon Laboratories in Austin, TX for alerting me to two funny supply chain videos.  Well, they would be even funnier if it weren’t so painfully true. Here are the links:

I want my widgets now

Where are the widgets I ordered?

What strikes me about these two videos is how little things [...]

8/27/2010 6:40:52 AM

There’s a new article on the eSourcingwiki, Understanding and Improving Supplier Performance. The wiki paper is also available for download on this page. It’s a good overview of the benefits and process of supplier performance management. If you haven’t read my book yet, this article provides an overview of some of the key concepts in it. In general the eSourcingwiki [...]

8/26/2010 8:20:56 AM

Recently I was asked about how many suppliers are typically monitored and measured, on average, using a supplier performance management (SPM) system or solution and whether there is a best practice. I have never come across a best practice in terms of numbers of suppliers to measure.

I know of one large company that was measuring 1200 suppliers [...]

7/29/2010 4:41:20 PM

I once worked in quality improvement capacity as Director of TQM for a distribution company for whom the term supply management was a new concept. Purchasing in particular felt that it had no clout or influence over suppliers. The rest of the company saw purchasing as the price choppers and the whipping boy for stock outs. [...]

7/23/2010 8:33:24 AM

Subscribers to the Value Chain Group site may now download Chapter 1 of Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence: A Guide to Meaningful Metrics and Successful Results. This download includes:

The book has been praised by its [...]

7/6/2010 1:26:04 PM

On June 17th, 2010 at midnight, someone got by PR Newswire’s vetting process and issued a fake press release about cereal maker General Mills. The press release falsely claimed that President Obama was launching an investigation into General Mill’s supply chain. The press released was confirmed to be a hoax and immediately retracted. The Wall Street Journal reported that investors [...]

6/28/2010 10:04:34 AM

Recently a supplier quality manager asked me about a dilemma he was having with the way his manufacturing facility was measuring in-process supplier quality. If they found defects in supplier parts during the manufacturing process, each defective item was tallied as part of the total. That is, each defective part counted against the total quality performance rather than [...]

6/11/2010 9:23:53 AM

I’ve discussed previously how supplier performance metrics work best when they are aligned with and support overall corporate goals and strategies and reasons why they can fail. But the challenge remains of how to tell whether you’ve come up with a good metric.  There are many ways to look at a metric to judge how effective it [...]

6/7/2010 7:51:16 AM

Supply chain failures seem inevitable these days, but are especially disconcerting when they indicate a larger systemic problem in critical equipment that is supposed to save lives. The U.S. Army just announced a recall of 44,000 Advanced Combat Helmets (ACH) manufactured by ArmourSource LLC (formerly Rabintex) due to concerns that they provide substandard ballistic protection. Another similar recall of 34,218 [...]

5/17/2010 8:56:00 AM

Last year I read with great interest about the results of the Supplier Relationship Management survey done by State of Flux, a procurement and supply chain consulting firm in the UK. The headlines about the results stated that companies were confusing supplier performance with supplier relationships.  The 2009 survey found that companies were largely monitoring supplier performance and were not [...]

4/29/2010 10:21:18 AM