Skip to main content

Supplier diversity - Have you checked your supplier base?

Recently blackenterprises.com published their list for 2009 Best Companies for Diversity , listing companies who are doing business with different diversity groups like employee base, board of directors, senior management and suppliers. From strategic sourcing initiative its very important to identify the diversity status of your supplier, have visibility towards your diversity supplier base.

Its not just legal apsect but social and economic aspect as well. You should be able to see and analyze how much of your vendor base is governmant certified small business, is it minority owned, hispanic, asian owned, woman owned, is 8a certified, hubzone certified.......There might be a individual certified business.

To have this visibility, you need to have your data in correct and updated shape. How many IT guys or business people care about this? You might have done this updation once, but what if EXIT DATE of the certification is crossed and vendor no more belong to that category? Or what if you have more vendors certified under these categories than you know.

Why should you look for diversity and small business supplier when the strategic decision is to consolidate the supllier business and save on costs. Recently Raj Sharma came across a good article about The Evolving Case for Supplier Diversity .

There are lot of strategic sourcing benefits that supplier diversity provides. Lets look at that in detail sometime later next week.

To know more or share your opinion on this you can always write to me on pmendki(at)gmail(dot)com or post your comments on this article.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Bristlecone Webinar on Supplier Risk Management

Purchasing Magazine, Bristlecone and SAP getting together to bring you very good discussion on supplier risk management. Webinar will be held on June 24, 2 to 3 PM eastern Time, USA. Contributors are - Paul Teague from Purchasing magazine , Jason Buch from spendmatters , Naresh Hingorani from Bristlecone - Supply chain leader company and Padmini Ranganathan from SAP. As we always talk about spend visibility, data issues, strategic sourcing - these distinguised speakers will bring out more strategic views to the table on how all this can be achieved to analyze your business risks better, upfront. You can register for event by accessing this link and register See you there.

Master Data Management – Product or Process ?

I have 2 SAP systems and I want to fix my material master, Services Master. I want all that data to be clean, standardized, classified, enriched and load it back to my SAP in next 6 months. What do you suggest ? Chris - one of my key client was explaining during a “solution understanding” call. My sales manager Tom, enthusiastically started talking about new version of the MDM platform by ERP company, tools, technologies, product landscape, licenses etc. After 30 minutes of sales pitch, I could see confusion on Chris’s face clearly. He said - but I don’t want to add any new product in my infrastructure for all this. Can you just implement MDM for me without I adding any new software ?   Both are using MDM implementation as a keyword, but in a completely different context. Chris wants to implement MDM as a process while Tom was trying to sell MDM as a new software. Whats the difference ? Lot I will say. MDM as a product – when you sell a   software license to a...

This is the time look at your data, your Spend Data

Hello Everybody. I was missing the action on this blog since around 4 months now. Actually I was too busy with new data management engagement in my new role. As its a vacation season, its time to gather thoughts and share it..... Hope I will continue... As the title of this blog says "its a time to look at your data, spend data". YES, as everybody is hard pressed for cash in the difficult time like this - where to look for it? I have one answer - Look at your own transactions to see if you can save some there. Lets check what are you spending on, categorise your spend well.Check if you know where you can negotiate with your vendors and go for it. You will amaze to see how you have ignored this point in the past and how much you can save by doing this. My experience tells me that you can get benefit of atleast 5 to 7 % of savings by doing this activity. Wondering how - Keep reading .... Lets make it simple. You have repository of suppliers, and lots of transactions for those s...