Good Morning! The first draft of this blog’s title was “Do you have suppliers you hate?” Hate is a strong word, so went with ‘don’t love’ instead. Although some of you may border on hatred toward some suppliers. If you have suppliers you don’t love, why??? Why are they still your supplier? Why don’t you love them? Most every time I hear disparaging words associated with a supplier it normally revolves around one thing. Availability. Not cost, not quality. Availability.

Good Morning! Do you have suppliers that are rock solid? Are they delivering high quality parts on time? Are their representatives personable and easy to work with? Most manufacturers have a handful of suppliers who fit this category. While it’s a wonderful thing to have suppliers you can trust, it’s OK to check them occasionally. I’ve seen several circumstances where a supplier is performing so well, the buying firm stops competitively quoting against them. The supplier s

Good Morning! The bankruptcy at Standard Register reminded me of a very important but sometimes forgotten task. Tag your assets. This is often forgotten until it’s too late. In the unfortunate event one of your suppliers falls on hard financial times, it’s important to prove an asset is yours. If not, the bank can use it to pay off whatever debt the supplier owes. So, if you have a $50,000 injection mold at a supplier and it’s not tagged as yours, it can be sold for the sc

Good Morning! Would you classify your organizations’ product development buying as strategic or transactional? Are your buyers simply sending out requests for quotes and placing work at the lowest cost supplier? How is cost defined? Are your engineers doing the buying? We’ll get into the other questions on another day, but this morning dive into why it’s not recommended for engineers to buy the parts they design. Salespeople love engineers. Engineers are easy targets. I k

Good Morning! Do you buy motors (copper windings), copper bent tubes, solenoids, brass castings, brass machinings, brass extrusions or any process/ material using copper? Go get your price decrease! The price of copper is down significantly over the last 9 months or so. It’s rebounded a bit of late, but still soft. Now is the time to be aggressive and get the cost savings. We always get the increase letter when prices escalate, but seldom get the letter that prices have sof