How do you assess the readiness and capability of your suppliers to collaborate with you?

When determining whether or not suppliers are prepared and able to work together, you must consider things like how well they communicate, how technologically savvy they are, and how well they align with the objectives and values of your company. You also need to make sure that suppliers have the tools, know-how, and attitude needed to work together successfully and achieve shared success. In order to determine their willingness and capacity for productive collaboration, this assessment may involve going over previous work, performing capability evaluations, and holding open discussions.

One thing that I have found helpful is to have a standardized supplier assessment framework. This allows me to evaluate suppliers consistently across a range of factors like quality, delivery, technology, cost competitiveness, business continuity planning, etc. I score each supplier on each criterion, which rolls up into an overall supplier scorecard. This makes it easy to segment suppliers into categories like preferred, approved, conditional, and high-risk. I can then tailor my collaboration approach depending on the segment - investing deeply with strategic preferred suppliers, keeping a watchful eye and requiring improvements from high-risk ones, and so on. This standardized, criteria-based assessment allows me to make decisions.

Une entreprise évalue généralement la préparation et la capacité de ses fournisseurs en utilisant une combinaison de critères: -Qualité des produits ou services -Fiabilité des livraisons -Capacité de production -Flexibilité -Prix -Respect des délais -Communication -Expérience -Certifications -Durabilité

Assessing suppliers' willingness and ability to collaborate involves several key steps. First, initiate open communication to gauge their interest in partnership and explore past collaborative experiences. Review their track record by looking at testimonials or case studies that highlight successful projects. Evaluate their flexibility by discussing their adaptability to changes and willingness to modify processes. Assess their commitment to quality and problem-solving skills, as these are crucial for effective collaboration. Additionally, consider the cultural fit between your organizations, as shared values can enhance cooperation. Finally, evaluate their resources and capabilities to ensure they can meet collaborative demands effectively

1) Segment your suppliers based on their strategic importance and their level of collaboration. 2) Assess your suppliers' readiness and capability to collaborate with you using criteria such as suppliers' performance, quality, innovation, responsiveness and sustainability. 3) Develop your suppliers' readiness and capability to collaborate with you through training, coaching, mentoring, benchmarking, audits and incentives. 4) Use joint projects and teams to foster collaboration and innovation, such as co-production, co-marketing or co-delivery. This is to create mutual value and benefits, improve performance and quality, reduce costs and risks, and strengthen trust and commitment.

One thing that I have found helpful is to clearly define the collaboration model I expect with strategic suppliers. This goes beyond transactional interactions and has dimensions like joint goal setting, innovation pipelines, transparency and data sharing, collective risk management, and relationship governance. I articulate my vision for the partnership and allow suppliers to self-evaluate if they are organizationally mature enough across people, process, technology, and culture to successfully deliver on that vision. This avoids assuming readiness just because past performance met older expectations. It surfaces capability gaps early for either fixing or concluding the supplier may not yet be positioned for deeper collaboration.

One thing I have found helpful is to take a long-term view when developing strategic suppliers. This means being patient if capability gaps exist today relative to the vision for the partnership. Not every supplier is ready to co-innovate, co-market or even share planning data right away. Pushing too fast or over-indexing on current limitations can backfire. Instead, I focus the initial development plan on the one or two capabilities that would be true game changers for the supplier to shore up. This still moves the needle while allowing other areas to organically strengthen over time as trust and interdependency in the relationship deepens. Taking the long view leads to better and more sustainable collaboration models in my experience.

The through line is that supplier relationships built on trust, transparency and human connections enable risks to be mitigated and opportunities to be amplified - delivering outsized value relative to contractually enforceable elements alone. The partnership itself becomes a high-performance asset when deliberately cultivated. Incentives and recognition to star suppliers should emphasize relationship contributions, not just business ones. Awards for outstanding collaboration, responsiveness, continuous improvement or knowledge sharing reinforce cultural partnerships. One leader even presents "Ally of the Year" awards to those suppliers that have tangibly helped remove roadblocks and propel internal stakeholder initiatives.