Managing Strategic Suppliers

Download this Corporate IT Forum Executive Summary.

Increasing economic pressure allied with a growing appetite for outsourcing means that Strategic Supplier Management has become a top level business strategy and even a source of competitive advantage.

Effective Strategic Supplier Management must evolve to meet the needs of the business. The IT Supplier Management landscape continues to change, and so the strategies and processes that enterprises put in place to maintain and manage their suppliers also have to adapt. Enterprises can gain value from management of suppliers they consider to be strategic to the business - but setting and managing a high-level strategy has never been more challenging, not least because the suppliers themselves can be choosy about which customers provide the most value to them.

Against this backdrop, there are key questions to answer for senior corporate IT professionals responsible for defining and implementing strategic supplier management: How should effective Strategic Supplier Management be established? How are strategies best kept up to date? Who should (and does) drive the relationships - the organisation, the supplier, or a genuinely shared approach? And what makes a partnership as opposed to a good supplier relationship?

The report is drawn from input from IT professionals responsible for developing and implementing the strategic approach to supplier management, and features input from a Government agency. It sets out to identify the key components of Strategic Supplier Management and how to implement it.