Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/540646
18 FEDA News & Views cals like updating the order status slips through the cracks. It's also the area where Central's credibility is most likely to take a hit, says Kidwell. "There's always been a lot of conversation around sales, espe- cially with our manufacturers, but the transactional part of the business was somewhat neglected and it became secondary," he says, elaborating on the logic behind Central's metrics. "Choosing a partner isn't just about topline sales. It's also about helping us improve our transactions and operations. If we're sending over several purchase orders every day and the manufacturer will not acknowledge them, what are we supposed to tell our customers? It's all about providing timely information and if we can't do that, it weak- ens our credibility." Central has been using a web portal for 15 years. Before the scorecards, vendor usage was at 50 percent; today it's hover- ing around 80, which has led to a huge boost in efficiency, says Kidwell. Interestingly enough, getting more vendors to expedite orders consistently on the portal has always been a priority. But it was the implementation of the scorecard that helped elevate the practice in the supplier's eyes—or more so provided Central with an opportunity to discuss its impor- tance with higher-ups. "When we first started doing the evaluations, there were a lot of aha moments," says Kidwell. "Many of our suppliers were Continuing the Dialogue continued Changing the Way You Cook since 1990 800.988.8103 360.650.1111 woodstone-corp.com STONE HEARTH & SPECIALTY Commercial Cooking Equipment Discover why OVER 13,000 OVENS, rotisseries, charbroilers, tandoors, and planchas have been SOLD IN 75+ COUNTRIES worldwide. Made in the USA. surprised by the importance that we placed on using the web portal. We're trying to work smarter and when we're able to provide more details, with less direct human interaction from our suppliers, it makes us more efficient and improves our customer response time." It's feedback like this that makes supplier performance score- cards valuable, says Lakeside's Joe Carlson, who also recalls having his own aha moment, of sorts, concerning Central's web portal. "If I asked our team before we got the scorecard if we were responsive and were doing everything we were supposed to be doing, they would have said absolutely, one hundred percent," he says. "It turned out we weren't because our perceptions were not in sync with Central's expectations. There was a disconnect on lead times. We thought we were doing better on lead times but they were tracking transit time on trucks and they had a different starting time, so we had to get in sync on that. The same with on-time shipments…what was the day that it was supposed to ship and did it ship on that day. Even with the basics, our team needed to get in sync with Central's team (when we first started using the score- cards) to confirm that we were measuring the same things the same ways. "That continues today. The scorecards gives us something to talk about, provides clarity and keeps our teams working toward the same goals. In the end, the manufacturer and distributor are serving the same customer so we are in this together. Having clarity about the things that are causing us to disappoint the customer, and then working on them as a team, is a good thing." Try Evaluating Yourself Vice President Teri Brewer is no stranger to supplier performance scorecards. One of her customers has been using them for years to provide feedback to THERMO-KOOL/Mid-South Industries, Inc. That customer, however, decided to shake up the process by sending the manufacturer a blank scorecard, and requesting they evaluate themselves. "That made us really nervous," says Brewer, "because we did not want to give them the impression that we thought we were better than they thought we were. So, rating ourselves was a pretty nerve-wracking balancing act. In the end, it turned out to be a really great tool for us internally. It made us think about how we were performing for our customers, those things that we do really well and those things that we need to work on and improve." How Distributors Can Help One of the biggest struggles that manufacturers face is deter- mining our market share. Take the grocery industry, for example, distributors share results from the retail checkout counters with manufacturers so they can see what's going on with their volume. If we can have the same future collaboration with FEDA, we can see how our products are performing and what we're doing with respect to the competition. Granted, it's a big undertaking. NAFEM has been trying to do it by having manufacturers volun- tarily submit information and then consolidate it, but the data is most accurate at the distribution level. --Joe Carlson, President of Lakeside