Investments in supplier diversity can have a significant impact on an organization’s performance, cost savings, competitiveness, brand reputation, and access to new markets.
While there is a growing appetite among organizations to implement best practices for benchmarking their success with supplier diversity, making it happen remains a challenge. Despite the best intentions, supplier diversity programs may be held back because of a lack of available performance metrics.
“We see more and more that companies are investing in supplier diversity because it’s the right thing to do; because it’s increasing their supply chain competitiveness; because it truly now has the executive buy-in all the way to the board level,” said Aylin.
Aylin and Lois pointed out that accurate and consistent benchmarking with reliable data and actionable insights is key to building and maintaining a successful supplier diversity program.
“It is extremely important for companies to know that best-in-class companies are doing benchmarking,” said Aylin, adding that benchmarking not only within but also outside of your industry to see how your peers are performing at the commodity level can help you identify new ways to improve your own supplier diversity program.
Lois highlighted that while it’s valuable to benchmark against your peers, organizations should not become overly fixated on modeling themselves after other supplier diversity programs. She encourages companies to ask themselves, “what does supplier diversity mean to your company, your market, your customers, and your values?” and to “bring your lens into what supplier diversity means for the values and business that you’re doing.”
Likewise, Aylin agreed that aligning your supplier diversity program and methodology for benchmarking its performance with your organization’s values and priorities will not only yield improved competitiveness and supply chain results, but it will also align with what customers want and need.
