Supply Chain Professional the Paradox

¶ … Supply Chain Professional The paradox of being a supply chain professional is that the purchasing process needs to be as efficient and low-cost as possible, yet the products and services obtained must meet the highest quality standard to pass government compliance requirements. Intermediating this challenge are the preferences and wants of customers that continually change, keeping this entire dynamic continually changing over time.

Supply chain professionals' ability to keep these three forces synchronized and moving forward to higher quality levels at lower costs while delivering a relatively constant eclectic, exciting stream of new products is what grows a business over time. The intent of this paper is to define the important aspects of the purchasing process with a mindset of how to continually meet government compliance and regulation requirements and customer needs.

Best Practices in Supply Chain Purchasing Managing a supply chain must begin with a framework of strategic objectives that sets the boundaries of quality management, government and product quality compliance, pricing, negotiations, and strategic sourcing strategies. For many manufacturing companies this framework of strategic objectives includes multi-year forecasts and plans for dropping cost while increasing quality levels.

The best practices in this area rely on collaborative process workflows and Supply Chain Management (SCM) that concentrate on building greater levels of information and trust with and between suppliers than grinding them on price alone. This strategy of using knowledge sharing between suppliers is antithetical to many industries, yet the benefits of knowledge sharing in a supply chain to increase quality and drop costs over time through fewer defects has been proven on Asian and European supply chains.

Supply chain professionals who seek to transform supply relationships need to think beyond pricing competition or availability constraints and think how they can turn knowledge into a competitive advantage over time. This is a long-term strategy yet it does deliver higher quality products over time and streamlines quality management initiatives as well.

For supply chain professionals there is also the continual battle of inbound audits of product quality and the commitment from suppliers to meet or exceed the quality standards as defined as part of the strategic framework both agree to. Navigating product audits can range from the relatively simple, as is the case in low-end manufacturing to the very complex and demanding, highly precise medical products auditing processes. Medical products can be audited at any time during their production cycle, which makes supplier management and quality standards all.