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

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...

Data Management - Terminologies & Definitions

As a third step in my Data Management article series – lets look at commonly used terminology in the domain. Now these are very standard definitions I am quoting from a standard available glossary. The next step – next article would be to explain the relevance and usage of these terminology in business world. E.g. How to look at data standardization in supplier data context or material data context – when it comes to optimizing your procurement processes. That’s next. In my first article in this data management series –I compared data management with the story of elephant and seven blind men. http://manageyourdata.blogspot.in/2012/09/data-management-elephant-seven-blind-men.html The second post is more about – why its important to speak same language when you are running any data management initiative.   http://manageyourdata.blogspot.in/2012/09/data-management-are-we-all-speaking.html Data analysis : Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transfo...

Journey of procurement transformation begins with..….. Part II

 Original Blog post - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-ii-prashant-mendki Procurement transformation journey is complex, cross functional, time consuming and even frustrating at times. The very basic but a strategic step to start this journey is “Spend Analysis”. Again – this has to be done in a right way to get the potential benefits. We talked about that in first part of this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-i-prashant-mendki By definition – Spend Analysis is an analysis of your spend (invoice paid), what items you are spending on (product), who you are paying to (supplier). It looks really simple – no? When I worked with one of the large Media Entertainment company few years back, they had thousands of suppliers, millions of transactions, good amount of Maverick spend. It’s a global business with more than $2Bn in Spend, 12 different global systems. Thousands of trans...