Supplier Collaboration

Can Your Company Survive Without Communication?

Communication in the Workplace Blog Image

The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a survey in 2018 to try and estimate the negative effects of poor communication in the workplace. Of the respondents, 52% said that poor communication added significant stress to their workday and 44% percent said that a lack of clear communication led to delays or failure to complete projects. Even worse, 18% responded that they lost sales due to ineffective communication.

Even though our communication tools are more advanced than ever, effective internal and external communication is still challenging for many companies. What are the effects of poor communication between your manufacturing organization and your suppliers? And most importantly, how can you overcome them?

Avoid the Pitfalls

Missed Purchase Orders

In the short-term, missed orders mean you may have to pay for expedited shipping or an expedited rush fee to your supplier. After paying for last-minute transportation costs, you’re left with thinner profit margins and stuck spending cash that your business can’t afford to throw away. In the long-term, missed purchase orders can risk damaging your reputation with your customer.

Changes To Purchase Orders

POs are always in flux. Vendors are constantly changing details like quantity, price and due date on purchase orders. Is your ERP data accurate so your company can make adjustments to production schedules? How quickly are you able to capture these changes with your suppliers and update your ERP?

Quality Issues

Real-time communication over quality issues with your suppliers is critical to keeping rejected materials out of your inventory. Supplier quality issues can hurt your organization if customers’ orders are impacted. Knowing a supplier’s quality ratings, timeliness, responsiveness, and price are key data points that can help you when comparing RFQs and choosing a supplier to work with.

Employee Frustration

Frustration has been dubbed the silent killer of productivity. Employees need the proper tools to be productive. When orders are missed, production schedules are thrown off. As a result, management often needs to adjust work schedules and account for periods of decreased productivity while waiting for a missing part. In the long term, these changes can impact your bottom line and lead to an increased turn over rate for your employees.

SourceDay Can Help

Companies have many tools at their disposal to improve communications such as email, fax, text, chat, and internal networks. However, with so many sources of information, details are often overlooked or ignored. The solution is a single unified platform that enables buyer and supplier collaboration through access to real-time data. SourceDay solves the problem lost sales due to ineffective communication. With SourceDay, you can manage all of your suppliers or buyers with streamlined communication, easy to read data and PO status updates in the form of push notifications. SourceDay provides real-time information critical to a manufacturing company’s survival, including:

  • PO status updates including vendor acknowledgment
  • Past due tracking
  • Alerts for “at-risk” items
  • Shipped item tracking & historical data
  • Supplier scorecard data including reliability, quality rating, price variance & responsiveness

Contact us to learn more about how SourceDay can streamline communication for your business and create collaboration between your buyers and suppliers!

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