Your suppliers are your partners and key profitability drivers. The effectiveness of your supply chains hugely impacts your business profitability, project delivery, and competitive performance.
Strategic supply chain development aims to progress your suppliers’ capability in several ways; strengthening your supplier relationships, building project resilience, driving programme certainty and delivering profitability for all partners.
Our team at BBI have extensive supply chain development experience, having previously worked in sectors such as manufacturing, automotive and aerospace. We tailor and deploy these proven practices throughout construction, personalised to your needs.
Below we discuss BBI’s approach to supply chain development in three steps.
Phase one – engage and review:
The starting point of any supplier development programme is understanding what value means to your client. In parallel, it is essential to consider your current procurement and supply chain landscape from a strategic perspective.
Once you have this understanding, it is key to engage all your stakeholders and key supply chain partners to collectively identify what is working well, and opportunities for improvement, throughout all areas of your organisation.
After this analysis, collectively we would develop and embed an objective supply chain evaluation process and collaboratively establish a strategic development plan.
This plan would align with world-class, leading supplier development processes, with proven impacts demonstrated in sectors like automotive, manufacturing and logistics.
Phase two – what does good look like:
Developing an objective mechanism to evaluate and measure the performance of your suppliers is key to identifying opportunities and potential risks. Supplier development aims to build long-term partnerships that have mutual benefits in collaborating.
The evaluation processes capture the status of a supplier’s capability and demonstrate ‘what great looks like’. It is important to recognise that improvement activities will be required at all levels, from the client through to the suppliers.
It is essential to recognise that modern supply chains are made up of global corporations, regional branches and local SMEs; the deployment approach will be tailored to suit individual organisations. This existing knowledge and experience of suppliers is utilised to support other supply chain members.
Phase three – sustainable development:
Internal and external ‘buy-in’ from the lead organisation and suppliers is key to promoting the development process. This is supported by a bespoke capability development programme, focusing on training key individuals within the lead supplier organisations.
To ensure continuous supply chain development, it’s key to establish ongoing monitoring processes and avenues of support, whilst defining the requirements for new and existing suppliers.
The engagement of suppliers is supported by sharing and showcasing best practices and hosting frequent supplier engagement events and celebrating successes.
The results?
Supply chain development ultimately enables profitable growth through:
- Stronger partnerships – building strong, integrated partnership improvements across all areas including design, procurement, logistics, and commercial to drive real value and outcomes.
- Productivity and quality improvements – streamlining processes throughout the value stream to ensure operations are as efficient and effective as possible, stimulating productivity improvements and enhancing the quality of suppliers’ manufacturing and assembly processes.
- Capability development – enhancing people and team capabilities from leadership through to operational delivery.
- Sustainability goals – support the sustainability goals with practices that are environmentally friendly, socially responsible and economically viable, helping organisations to work towards their sustainability goals.
- Competitive advantage – robust supplier networks provide a competitive edge in an ever more challenging sector.
The next step?
Want to build stronger partnerships? Send ‘Supply Chain’ to our team today for an intro chat: