The best performing supply chain operations in the world didn’t start out as highly efficient profit centers. Through struggle and sometimes failure, leading companies have refined, adapted, and improved processes to meet the needs of the organization and customers.

A Supplier Quality Management System is developed to encourage continuous improvement by clearly communicating your company’s expectations and requirements to your supply partners. It also helps ensure that a professional and structured exchange is achieved between all parties on all issues regarding product Quality, Delivery, Cost, and Responsiveness.

Leading companies, both large and small, are going beyond just outsourcing commodities to also outsourcing core/strategic parts and services. It often makes financial and operational sense for smaller firms with scarce resources to outsource non strategic parts and non core competency services.

Winning a motorsports endurance race is the result of careful planning, teamwork, and execution requiring a large upfront investment in time and resources. Developing a localized supply base aboard is similar to preparing for a race in that it takes supply base building steps of planning, qualifying, and establishing that untimely create an international world class supply base that can support a new plant.

Focusing on unique component and product quality requirements, especially technical specifications and tolerance levels, in advance of sourcing reduces supply risk by enhancing supply partner qualification criteria.

In 1990 C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel published The Core Competence of the Corporation that to this day is the most reprinted article in the history of the Harvard Business Review (HBR). It keeps getting reprinted because its premise is still very relevant (perhaps more so today). This core competency article argues that every organization needs to focus all of its scarce, limited, and valuable resources (manpower, machines, money, management, and material – the 5Ms) on being the best at one specific thing (your core competency).