Supplier development helps you make a long-term and stable partnership with your suppliers. Here I’ll introduce it in detail for your further understanding.
What is supplier development?
Supplier development is a business strategy that helps you work effectively with suppliers. It involves processes such as investigating, evaluating, and establishing selection criteria.
Throughout supplier development, you can improve suppliers’ quality, delivery time, and technical capabilities, thus establishing a mutually beneficial long-term partnership with them. It also helps to reduce risks in the supply chain, eliminate unnecessary costs in the business, and improve supplier responsiveness to your demands more promptly.
Supplier development process
The supplier development process is a key component of procurement and supply chain management operations. Here we discuss 4 steps to implement an effective supplier development process.
Evaluate suppliers
When sourcing suppliers for goods and services, it is important to assess suppliers’ capabilities. You can evaluate your suppliers from the following aspects.
Check how long the supplier company has been established. The longer it is set up, the more reliable they are.
Check their location and select those located in or near the industrial cluster. Here’s a practical tip. If you’re looking to source toy figures and you search for suppliers on Alibaba, you’ll find that over 60% of them are located in Chenghai, Guangdong. This means that toy figures are produced in this area and it is easy to find a real factory here.
Find if they create the sample exactly according to your requirements.
Take plush toy customization for example. You can check if they 100% replicate your design, if each part is placed in the correct position, if they use the technique you designate like heat transfer to print patterns, and if the sample is of good quality.
If you are not satisfied with the sample, you can ask them to continue making modifications until it meets your requirements. During the modification process, you can also assess whether their attitude and efficiency meet your expectations.
Select several suppliers and choose a reasonable price range by removing those with the highest and lowest prices.
Develop a list of potential suppliers
After conducting a sample evaluation, you will be able to select several suppliers that meet your expectations. You can list them by different categories, such as supplier type which is about factory size and location, cost, speed of new product development, etc. Then, you can choose your preferred supplier from the list and keep the others as backups. You can also place a small order to test their performance.
A comprehensive evaluation of suppliers during the cooperation
After the trial order, you can reevaluate your suppliers by setting some indicators, like on-time delivery rate, defect rate, response speed, etc. Then, you can remove poor-performing suppliers and make optimization plans for those that you believe have room for improvement.
You can list the problems according to the level of urgency and prioritize the urgent issues. Suppose you want to reduce the delivery time, you can ask your supplier to find solutions. They may improve equipment efficiency or develop new processes to address these issues.
Follow up on the result
After implementing the plan, you need to constantly follow up on your issues and observe if there is any improvement. If the optimized results are still too far from your expected goals, you can establish a partnership with another supplier from your potential supplier list.
Jingsourcing can smooth your supplier development process
We have lots of long-term cooperative suppliers who are experienced in a wide range of product categories and they are located in China’s industrial clusters. All of them have passed our strict factory audit.
When you want to source or customize products, we will first select suitable suppliers according to your requirements, help you confirm the product details, modify the sample according to your requirements, and then send their samples to you together. In this way, you can directly choose which supplier you want to cooperate with, saving a lot of time and costs.
Throughout this process, we will always stand in your shoes and communicate with the suppliers on your behalf. For any issues, we will find solutions and monitor the subsequent procedures to see if there is any improvement finally. You only need to check the final result.
Currently, many buyers choose sourcing agents to optimize their supply chains safely and efficiently. If you want to develop good and stable suppliers from China, Jingsourcing is definitely your wise choice.
Get a reliable supplier for your business
- Supplier selection
- Strict factory audit
- Quality assurance
