When running a company, having a good vendor management system can be very important to measure supply chain efficiency. The results are determined by analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, usually done through a supplier scorecard.

This kind of system greatly impacts your business since it can make a difference in things like the supply chain health and the vendor’s performance.

There are dozens of reasons to have a supplier scorecard. Besides using those scorecards as key performance indicators for the vendors, you can also use them for management practice and lots of other things.

The vendor management system also aims to minimize risks at the company along with the tracking objective. There are some supplier evaluation points when using the supplier scorecard that allows you to do such things. Here are some of these points:

When looking up supplier scorecards, there are many categories that you can include in your template. Thinking of this, you have to understand your business in order to decide which ones are the most important for you. After that, choose the KPIs that will impact the measurement of supplier performance and other things.

However, there are some instructions that you should consider following when analyzing your vendor scorecard, no matter what business you have. The following topics will help your company better control your procurement team and determine performance evaluations that can complement your work.

Source: Sourceday

Delivery Standards

If your company works with delivery operations, this category is indispensable. Assuring that the deliveries will arrive on time and under the stipulated date is one of the keys to gaining credibility and having a good reputation as a company.

Be sure to include this category on vendor scorecards. Some orders may contain more complicated date combinations. When this happens, you may need a specific date software to keep track of those orders and evaluate the vendor delivery standards, but this won’t happen very often, depending on your business.

Price Standards

This is normally a harder category to evaluate and keep track of. Since sometimes companies work with a high number of different products and each one has its tolerance to price variation, scoring this will demand more time and organization than the previous ones.

Although including price variation is a hard task, having these metrics in vendor management systems is very important. Be sure to analyze your company and find out the best way to evaluate this score and its criteria.

Another habit that has a huge positive impact on a supplier scorecard is asking for feedback. When you do this, you may end up having new insights and ideas that didn’t come up when analyzing pure numbers and metrics.

The same works for problems since the workers may identify flaws that interfere with the vendor’s performance or even general vendor relationships. This guarantees that you will better understand your company as a whole and will also grant you a way more effective supplier scorecard.

With this in mind, it’s good to know that there are dozens of tools for making vendor scorecards, from beginner ones to more advanced types of software. Although there is a huge variety of options available, we consider two of them the best for the job.

Excel and PowerPoint are great options for supplier scorecards, no matter if you are doing a grading scale or any other type because they both have a variety of tools. This makes the software capable of fitting any business and complexity you want to include in your vendor evaluations.

PowerPoint is more often used to make a presentation out of these scorecards, with multiple slides and a more pleasant presentation. On the other hand, Excel is better for creating the sheet itself and organizing the KPIs with their categories and all the columns you need to get your results.

Get this template

This template was created for people to show the scorecard results as a presentation on PowerPoint. The main objective of this kind of template is to create a more dynamic and efficient communication to everyone involved, including team, stakeholders or any other party involved.

Get this template

This template uses a vertical layout, being more indicated for those who also want to keep a physical copy of the material. It can also be better to work with if you have lots of categories in your scorecard.

Get this template

This is the most common type of scorecard template available. It is an Excel document that can be personalized with all the categories you want. Best indicated for those who need versatility on the template and a large number of KPIs.

Now you have everything you need to make the best vendor scorecard and measure the supplier performance of your business. Use the huge variety of tools available on that software to create a personalized template that fits your needs.

Remember that if you don’t want to create a supplier scorecard from scratch, you can also use ready templates of supplier scorecards and just edit them. It’s up to you to decide what is best for your company and what matters when building this kind of document.