Understanding supplier performance is vital to ensuring a well-functioning supply network. This how-to book will help you develop and implement an evaluation process to help you reduce costs, lower risk, and improve both the performance of your company and your suppliers.

This practical text includes examples of best practices that companies are using to evaluate suppliers and illustrates how to get beyond collecting data for the sake of data to achieving real results. It shows how to get at the meaning behind supplier metrics, and choose measurements that are meaningful both in the context of your company's goals and also for the supplier. Supplier Evaluation and Performance Excellence helps you get at the root causes of supplier problems that even suppliers may be unaware of and enable them to make high-impact improvements.

Many firms do not know where to begin in the supplier evaluation process, what ways would work best, or even what kind of results they want to get. They know that they should be measuring supplier performance, but may not understand why or what they would gain from it. This book is geared toward managers at two types of companies: those who know that they should be measuring supplier performance but don't know where to start, and companies who want ideas about how to improve or revitalize a current program.