Better Supplier Relationship — More product innovation

Just take a look into two suppliers and what they have to say about their respective customers when surveyed by Delloite:

Statement by supplier on Tesla.

“Tesla is extremely aggressive, but takes a position that they are the innovator and will drive technology to the supply base,”

Statement by supplier on Ford.

“Excessive amounts of paperwork for product development. Working around in Ford computer system for purchasing, and logistics was extremely confusing,

Who do you think will win in the longer run? When suppliers are the lifeline for most businesses in today’s world, isn’t it obvious that businesses with better and transparent supplier relationship will end up winning the game? Tesla in this case.

William Forsythe IV, a principal at Deloitte further highlighted this fact by stating that

“Suppliers are managing their relationships with OEMs differently than in the past. They’re being selective about customers with whom they choose to do business.”

While these sorts of supplier — buyer relationships are a commonplace across the procurement community, we would be amiss to call it collaborative. In these relationships the supplier is clearly subservient to the buyer, the buyer ‘says’ and the supplier ‘does’. This is a cooperative relationship not a collaborative one, which is why the term SRM (supplier relationship management) is broken.

Collaborative relationships involve the multi-directional sharing of information to aid a mutually beneficial, pre-defined goal. Collaborative relationships require sacrifices and tradeoffs from both sides that will ultimately provide greater long term value for both organisations. These sorts of relationships require a departure from traditional procurement metrics, measurements and mindsets and forces the buyer and supplier to consider the broader potential of their engagement.

Hence why DrGrep platform can be so different from rest of the others. It’s a platform that allows the company and its suppliers to share key business and product information over a secure internet connection, allowing these critical relationships to flourish. While eInvoicing is the center piece of the core value proposition, 100 different things can be automated around it to make the supplier-buyer relationships more relevant than ever before.

If you are one of those buyers who rely on 10s or 100s or even 1000s of suppliers (they may be providing you business softwares, raw materials, marketing services etc.) to produce your goods and bring that to market, you better have a platform to set up the next generation of collaboration relationships with them. While a happy supplier can help you bring your product faster, a disadvantaged supplier can delay it months costing you millions.