Your suppliers should be partners. Just like your business, your suppliers have to manage costs such as labor and inventory, so anything you can do to help them reduce those costs makes your relationship more valuable, because they expend fewer resources serving your needs, and thus they can invest more in helping you grow your business. If your business grows, and you are a committed and loyal partner to them, then their business will grow as well. The incentives should be aligned. If you work to align the incentives, your suppliers can justify being a better partner to you.
So, what can you do to help align the incentives and to become a better partner to your suppliers?
First of all, making a commitment to be a loyal partner by making them a major supplier to your business is crucial. Business volume helps them. Second, conducting business in a manner that helps them to manage labor and inventory more efficiently will help you to become a better partner to them. Placing orders online, rather than calling your orders in will reduce their labor costs and reduce ordering mistakes. Mistakes are expensive in the supply chain. Placing orders only weekly, rather than daily or multiple times per day helps to optimize labor and shipping costs. Plan ahead to optimize your interactions with your suppliers. Also, suppliers can tell you the days and times that have the lowest order volume for them, so ordering on those days or days and times when they can optimize their staffing and labor improves your relationship as well.
Share business information and data with your suppliers. The more that your suppliers can learn about the needs of your business, the more capable they will be at satisfying your needs and helping you to optimize your business. At some point, the most efficient practices will provide direct, real-time inventory monitoring to their supplier partners so that ordering is automatic and essentially people-less.
These are only a few examples of how you can become a better partner to your suppliers. The more that you do to become a better partner will provide opportunities for your suppliers to make investments in your business by supporting programs that will help you grow. Become a true partner to your suppliers.
