Project
Supplier Relationship Management is part of a research project called Strategic eSourcing that is supported by the PROFIT program of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.E-Sourcing
The goal of Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) is to stablish a technologic framework capable of giving support to the buying process. It evaluates the supply activity of a company in a process that is called strategic e-sourcing, and that is a fundamental element of any supply chain scenario.The application SRM specifically focus in supplier performance. It evaluates past orders to support supplier selection.
For example:
Imagine you are the person in charge of buying the office supplies for your company. You have ordered thirty pens of a certain quality, and you asked to receive them by tomorrow. You reach an agreement with the supplier 'The Happier'. Unfortunately, you receive sixty pencils two days late. You feel disappointed as you wanted pens, not pencils, and you needed them immediately, not two days latter. The supplier 'The Happier' is not trustworthy.
Your level of satisfaction with the outcome of the agreement will depend on: (1) how important was for your company each order dimension --in the example: product, quality, quantity and delivery day--, (2) how different is what you got --the observation-- compared with what you asked for --the commitment-- and, of course, (3) which are your preferences.
SRM Application
SRM provides four analysis tools to manage the supplier performance: Trust, Supplier, Critical Order and Minimal Cost:· Trust: to analyze the trust evolution over time in a supplier for a given commitment. For this purpose, three charts are represented: a bar and a point similarity charts representing the PDF, and a chart with the trust evolution over time.
· Supplier: to analyze suppliers by similarity or satisfaction in the historic of interactions. This tool provides a ranking of suppliers and a set of charts representing the comparison between two suppliers along each order dimension. The following picture illustrates a screenshot of this tool.
· Critical Order: to rank suppliers based on its trust for a desired order and the relative importance of each order dimension. In this way, a user can establish priorities between order dimensions.
· Minimal Cost: to obtain a split of orders along suppliers such that the split guarantees the levels of satisfaction that we want for each order dimension whilst minimizing the overall cost. The result is shown in a pie chart that you can see in the figure.
