If you buy products from a few Chinese suppliers, do you have a system for managing them? And do you use data for that?

In this post, I’ll show you how to manage Chinese suppliers using facts and data.

How professional purchasers work

Professional purchasers tend to work in the following way with their key suppliers:

1. Collect some key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect their performance (typically about quality, cost, on-time deliveries, and service/responsiveness)
2. Give feedback to the supplier at regular intervals (e.g. every month, or every 3 months), with comparisons
3. Allocate orders based on performance, and on the hope of performance improvement

How to work with suppliers, to improve their performance?

I am amazed by how few importers provide structured and data-based feedback to their key suppliers.

If you do it, you might be the only customer who shows these data are tracked! Your suppliers will likely pay attention (as long as you are not a very small customer). The salesperson will probably show it to other people and discuss it.

On top of formal feedback, what could you do?

• Send someone to their facility to “sell” the need to improve their performance — this needs to be someone capable of creating a meaningful human connection and drive change, not a robotic order processing clerk…
• Challenge a supplier. Show them their competition is doing better.
• Request their general manager to come to your office/factory and explain their poor performance.
• And, of course, penalties and chargebacks. Sadly, treating them like children is sometimes the only thing that works…

I have started to give regular training to our team internally. This was intended for our supplier auditors and our project managers, but I recorded it separately and it can be useful for your company’s purchasers too. 

(Can’t see the video above? Use this link to watch it: How importers can push their suppliers to improve. Also, the sound quality is not always top-notch. Sorry about that. But the content is still easy to consume.)

Typical KPIs that you can track about your suppliers

In the video below, I cover typical KPIs in more depth.

As a bonus, I also cover a way to explain to your suppliers the link between quality issues and the costs they generate:

• Costs to THEIR company — I show a breakdown of typical such costs. Factory owners care a lot about RMBs, and that’s how you need to talk to them!
• Costs to YOUR company (the buyer) — not only in USD but in wasted time, too. It can all be converted into points for easy aggregation and interpretation.

(If you can’t see the video above, use this link to watch it: The most common supplier KPIs  for importers)

Now, based on this advice, can you see how to manage your Chinese suppliers in a different light? Let me know in the comments, please.

Ultimate Guide To Sourcing From China And Developing Your Suppliers [eBook]

This FREE eBook starts from the beginning, discussing whether you need to hire a sourcing agent, and follows the sourcing process right through to developing a trusted supplier’s quality and productivity.

There are 15 chapters over 80+ pages to explore, providing exhaustive guidance on the entire sourcing and supplier development process from start to finish, including:

• Identifying suppliers,
• Negotiations,
• Quality inspections,
• Developing Chinese suppliers,
• Improving factory quality and productivity,
• and much more…