Defining the role of "Head of Supplier Management"

stakeholders and selling to suppliers on why your organisation should be a customer of choice for them. Any good sales person knows that being a good listener is a key behaviour for success. Starting with the executive stakeholders. You must start by understanding the business challenges they are seeking to resolve along with their aspirations for the business. Moving onto core business stakeholders who contribute to supplier management activity, listen to their views on what works well, and the potential opportunities. This can be a rich source for identifying sources of untapped value in the supplier relationship and is demonstrating an interest in what they think, which in turn builds trust, leading to greater internal stakeholder engagement. Finally, not forgetting to listen to the supplier stakeholders at each level of engagement, and involving them throughout the process, starting with formally understanding whether you are a customer of choice. This approach not only builds engagement, it demonstrates commitment and supports momentum when launching supplier management into the business. Our experience suggests many clients spend more time telling stakeholders and especially suppliers what is needed, rather than listening first, and then wonder why a collaborative programme doesn’t meet expectations. Key to success is getting supplier management so embedded into the culture and behaviours of the business that it becomes ‘just the way we do business’. The Head of Supplier Management is responsible for leading this change. They need to educate stakeholders on what supplier management means for their organisation, why they need to embrace it, invest in it and change behaviour to be more collaborative. The Head of Supplier Management must champion a positive supplier experience when dealing with your organisation and drive supplier loyalty. All things to support being a customer of choice. Defining success criteria and performance metrics Before we look at the individual’s performance it is worth highlighting There are two key measures that both the supplier management programme and the Head of Supplier Management must be measured on. 2) Progress towards the agreed future state In order to measure both of these items you need to know the starting point. At the start of supplier management activities, we strongly recommend that you conduct a Voice of the Supplier to measure your organisation's Customer of Choice rating. That is, 1) Improvement of customer of choice rating

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