The role of suppliers as a component of a company's competitive advantage is increasingly on the rise, and companies stand to realize many benefits from assessing and developing their supply base. These benefits range from measurable improvements in basic performance metrics (e.g., on-time delivery, quality, and cost) to deeper alignment of business practices.

This in turn better enables companies to uncover and remove hidden cost drivers from the supply chain, increase competitive advantage by reducing order cycle time and inventory, and gain insight on how to best leverage their supply base.

Moreover, factoring supplier performance into sourcing decisions can lead to lower total costs, improved business performance, and stronger supplier relationships.

While most enterprises view vendor performance as critical, only half have formal programs in place. Some companies have patched together Excel-based systems to track performance but find it is onerous to manage. Others have invested in armies of assessors who systematically survey key suppliers; this approach, however, is neither scalable nor cost efficient. And yet others too often rely on only basic external measures of supplier performance. Without insight into the performance being delivered to their company, they have little chance of affecting sustainable performance gains.

Electool's Supplier Performance Management, ScoringTool overcomes these challenges and enables efficient evaluation and tracking of supplier performance through a central repository of key performance indicators and scorecards and a robust assessment capability that identifies root cause drivers of a suppliers' performance.