Wales, were invited to a Supplier Association meeting by the car maker.
Trico’s Purchasing Manager, Jim Taylor, and his boss, David Jones, did not,
at this time, realize that this meeting was to have far-reaching implications
for them and their company. Indeed, at this time they did not know what
a Supplier Association was and were understandably wary of any new ini-
tiative that their main customer might be launching. They had in the past
had far too many experiences with other customers of ‘talking shops’,
‘flavours of the month’ and ‘initiative overloads’.
As it turned out, Rover were trying to get past the rhetoric of ‘partner-
ship words but adversarial actions’. They were attempting to move them-
selves and their supply chain into the next century as a world-class
extended enterprise. As one of the Rover directors mentioned at this first
meeting, ‘we need to do more than just talk the talk, we need to walk the
walk, we need to actually work together and implement real change’. Well,
it all seemed to make sense to Jim and David, but were Rover and the
Source Wales team actually going to deliver?
Some months passed and Trico were invited to more events. Discussions
took place, plans were drawn up and both they and the other suppliers
started to buy into the process and make significant improvements. Rover
reported that members of the group had reduced quality failures by
around 80 per cent whilst suppliers outside Wales had improved by only a
few percentage points. Jim and David could see that the process was
working. It was not long before Rover mentioned that their suppliers
should start thinking about their own supplier development. The Rover
Purchasing Director commented that ‘we’re not saying that you all need to
rush away and set up your own Supplier Associations, that might not be
the best vehicle, but we at Rover would be very interested in hearing about
a better approach because we haven’t found one yet!’
This set Jim and David thinking. Would the same process work for them
and their suppliers? At about this time they attended a two-day Source
Wales briefing run by Paul Morris. After a day and a half they were still not
convinced that a Supplier Association was the right thing for them. Surely
it would just end up being a ‘talking shop’. It was then that Paul Morris
started a discussion on how two types of hard and soft benchmarking
could be used to focus suppliers and allow for mutual target setting. He
also shared his experiences of problems in setting up such groups and how
to avoid the dreaded ‘talking shop’ syndrome. Jim and David started to be
convinced that this was for them.
Then Paul showed a ten-stage checklist (Figure 3.1.1) for Supplier Assoc-
iations that ensured that there was not just a wish list for improvement, but
a clearly defined process which will ensure that suppliers bought in were
made aware of where they needed to improve, could become educated
both in theory and practice and, what’s more, could actually achieve
change. This was what Jim and David were waiting to hear. They now
The supplier and alliance market domain 183