Course Description

This course has been classified as Management Development & Leadership. The course brings together a structured and comprehensive approach to managing suppliers which has been proven to be effective in a wide range of public and private sector organization.

It demonstrates through real world case studies both successful and unsuccessful practices, and exactly what can be done to generate stunning levels of service provider performance. Step by step you will build a toolkit of supplier management improvement tools. 

Course Objective

Key benefits:

·         Highlight factors which are critical to the success of achieving excellent performance through suppliers

·         Show how the present current economic climate can be used to lock in a long term advantage

·         Significantly improve the performance of suppliers in key areas such as quality, delivery, lead times, innovation and responsiveness

·         Provide tools, methodologies and approaches to working with suppliers on performance improvement and joint cost reduction programmes

·         Share a number of approaches which have been found to be effective in aligning supplier performance with the needs of customers

·         Explain and explore a framework for building effective working relationships with colleagues and with contract staff, suppliers and others

·         Describe the ways in which supplier management can be used to provide competitive advantage 

Who Should attend?

Directors, managers and staff who are responsible for managing suppliers. This will include:

·         Staff in procurement, operations and finance

·         Those responsible for managing external service providers in areas such as logistics, IT, facilities management and distribution

·         Managers and staff who are responsible for suppliers who provide outsourced services 

Course Outline

1 The root cause of failure

·         A leading consultancy survey of supplier performance

·         Root cause analysis of failure

·         Remedies and key lessons

2 Approaches for finding the best supplier

·         The criterion based approach

·         The "prospectus" tool

·         Fool-proofing supplier selection

3 Best practice processes, tools and techniques

·         Parallels between managing your own organisation and managing suppliers

·         Innovative ideas that are rooted in common sense

·         Disciplines, tools and methodologies which guarantee success

4 How world class organisations manage their suppliers

·         Managing the "extended enterprise"

·         Leading examples from manufacturing, financial services and the public sector

·         A case study for course participants to analyse

5 Practical approaches to creating leverage

·         The four pillars on which supplier management should be based

·         Alternative forms of power

·         Supplementing contractual leverage

6 Working without leverage

·         Using relationships as a power substitute

·         Basing a relationship on something other than a contract

·         Rights, remedies and substitutes for leverage