Ask three people in an operation which supplier is the worst and you will get three confident answers, usually based on whoever caused the most recent painful morning. That is supplier management by feeling, and it is how most growing companies actually run.
The problem is not that the feelings are always wrong. The problem is that you cannot negotiate, escalate, or delist based on a feeling. You need numbers that survive a difficult conversation.
When a product you ordered is not on the shelf, the failure can come from at least six places:
Only the first three belong to the supplier. If your measurement mixes all six together, every supplier scorecard you produce is partly fiction, and your suppliers know it.
Vendor Service Level measures how reliably a supplier delivers the products and quantities that were ordered. It is the baseline accountability number.
OTIF, on time in full, is stricter: was the order delivered at the right time and in the right quantity, as one combined result? A supplier can have a decent service level and a poor OTIF, which usually means your replenishment plan is absorbing their unreliability with extra stock and extra buffer days. That cost is real even when the shelf looks fine.
The uncomfortable part: to trust these metrics, you first have to measure your own side. Receiving accuracy and master data quality are the internal mirror of supplier performance. In one operation, a visible share of "supplier failures" turned out to be goods that had arrived and were booked incorrectly by our own process.
Supplier performance measured honestly changes two relationships at once. Suppliers stop hearing vague complaints and start seeing evidence. And your own team stops hiding internal misses inside the supplier's number. Both conversations get shorter, and both get more productive.
Log every ordered-but-not-delivered case and attribute it to one of the six causes, so suppliers stop hearing vague complaints and your own team stops hiding internal misses inside the supplier's number.
The Cash Scan turns your own data into four documents in seven days: where your working capital is sitting, which SKUs are costing you sales, and your planned media budget translated into required units by week. $1,500, credited in full against the Sprint, and findings in seven days or you do not pay.
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