Voice of the Supplier

Find out how your suppliers rate your relationship

Organisations and their procurement teams are used to the idea of rating suppliers on their performance.

But the supplier’s opinion matters too. If a supplier doesn’t believe that your business is interested in their innovative ideas, then those ideas may go to your competitors. And a supplier that sees little future in the relationship won’t put their best team on your account.

We developed our supplier relationship research model – ‘Voice of the Supplier’ – to give SRM practitioners an insight into how their organisations are perceived by key suppliers. The model asks suppliers to rate the quality of the relationship they have with your organisation, and compare it with the relationships they have with other customers (who could be your major competitors).

Focus on improvement actions, or set a baseline

Organisations usually come to us for ‘Voice of the Supplier’ analysis when they want to build a business case for investment in SRM, understand where they need to improve their business practices and behaviours, or set a baseline against which to measure improvements.

We send clients regular progress reports throughout the project. The ‘Voice of the supplier’ model works like this:

Tailor our online questionnaire to suit the client’s organisation and requirements (questions typically cover issues such as innovation and ideas, communication and information sharing, decision making and execution).
Run the online survey (typically 100-150 strategic and preferred suppliers), and collate and analyse the responses (see example of survey results below).
Carry out follow-up telephone interviews (typically with 10-20 suppliers) to uncover the detail behind the issues we found in the survey results.
Deliver a final report that sets out the main relationship issues and recommends a set of priority actions to address them.

Example of an online survey score

Survey results show how suppliers rank their relationship with your organisation against their relationship with other organisations (these score charts are only one part of the final report).