why the association was important to Trico and how it was crucial to their
achievement of the mission statement. It went on to define the Trico Quest
Supplier Association as:
A mutually beneficial grouping of key suppliers linked together in a strategic
alliance by their supply to Trico. A self help team brought together on a
regular basis to share knowledge and experience in an open and co-opera-
tive manner with the purpose of members mutually approving and develop-
ing skills, systems and techniques, integrating processes and eliminating
wastes.The document explained why the association was being developed, the
commitment Trico was giving and what they expected the suppliers to
commit to (Figure 3.1.3).
The process for implementation was drawn up in the strategy document
and was to include the use of benchmarking, four management seminars
per year, with supplementary workshops run as required. All of this was
designed to be within a networking framework. Lastly, the document out-
lined the types of mutual benefits to be sought. The benefits fell very much
in line with the commitments being promised by Trico and the suppliers.
In January 1995 a group of nine suppliers were invited to the Supplier
Invitation Conference. These suppliers, although only about 10 per cent of
the total number, were responsible for 80 per cent of Trico’s purchases.
They ranged from plastic and rubber raw material and parts makers, to
metal processors and packaging suppliers. During the whole day confer-
ence Trico’s strategies were explained by the top management team, the
concept of the Supplier Association was explained and a proposed
working framework was presented by Jim based on the strategy docu-
ment.
After lunch the suppliers were split into groups and asked to give their
views. There was, of course, a good degree of scepticism from the suppli-
ers and some concern about what the work would achieve. However, with
the guidance of Paul, Jim was able to persuade all the suppliers to buy into
the process and to agree to take part in the two types of benchmarking.
The first type, called Continuous Improvement Benchmarking, meas-
ured nine key attributes concerned with quality, productivity and delivery
performance. This was designed to produce hard data which could be used
for targeting of future performances. However, when this benchmarking
was applied to the firms (including Trico themselves) a problem arose,
namely, most of the firms were not recording some aspects of their per-
formance and had trouble even understanding one or two of the questions.
As a result, agreeing hard targets would be next to impossible.
Consequently this was not done at this stage.
The second type of benchmarking, called Supplier Capability
The supplier and alliance market domain 187