Choosing the right suppliers for your food and beverage (F&B) company can mean the difference between quality and compromise. Between innovation and stagnation. And between profits and losses.
In other words, how you build your supplier relationships matters — maybe even more than you realize. A strong, collaborative partnership contributes to better supply chain efficiency, improved product value and safety, enhanced sustainability, quicker speed to market and faster innovation.
But building a strong connection with your suppliers isn’t as easy as signing a contract and calling it a day. Challenges often stand in the way of achieving true supplier engagement.
Why Supplier Engagement Is So Difficult
For starters, it can be a challenge to find the data you need from your suppliers, such as information about:
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Ingredients
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Certifications
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Batch/lot traceability
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Compliance
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Sales/marketing
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Inventory
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Costs
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Production schedules
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Environmental practices
This disconnect is often due to the fact that many companies lack the resources and expertise they need to support advanced collaboration. They still rely on outdated methods, such as manual spreadsheets, emails and phone calls, which hinders efficiency and compliance.
Inadequate data-sharing platforms and poor technology integration lead to data inconsistencies, data gaps, miscommunication and lack of real-time insights. Concerns about data privacy and security can also make it more difficult to share information.
When this lack of communication isn’t addressed, it can impact visibility, innovation, quality and safety.
The Impact of Miscommunication
Let’s say that a national beverage company relies on a specific type of fruit concentrate to create its signature sports drink flavor. Due to a breakdown in communication, the supplier fails to inform the beverage manufacturer about a labor strike that has created ingredient shortages and price spikes.
Unaware of the impending shortage and price increase, the manufacturer continues production as usual. When the fruit-concentrate shortage hits — seemingly out of nowhere — the manufacturer can no longer find the fruit concentrate needed to fulfill demand. As a result, it must stop production, which delays fulfillment and leads to lost sales.
To prevent these negative impacts from continuing, the beverage company has no choice but to scramble to find alternative suppliers. This mad rush puts budgets, quality, operational efficiency and even compliance at risk.
And while it’s obvious how these information gaps hurt the manufacturer, it also damages the existing relationship with that supplier. “Customers are required by regulations and, in some cases, audit standards to collect documentation for supplier locations and the items they purchase,” explains Mary Grunder, Senior Customer Success Manager at TraceGains. “If a supplier isn’t willing to share the requested information, then their customer is less likely to renew or create new contracts with that supplier.”
How to Improve Supplier Collaboration … Starting Now
Modernizing communication and collaboration between your F&B company and your suppliers can drive innovation and growth. Here are a few ways you can make progress to improve teamwork.
1. Update Communication Tools
Manual approaches only take you so far into your supply chain. Transition from legacy processes like emails and phone calls and use digital platforms that facilitate real-time data sharing and communication.
For example, instead of manually reaching out to the suppliers within all tiers of your supply chain, use a centralized platform that gathers and aggregates data from disparate suppliers for you. You won’t have to worry about collecting data or waiting to receive the information you need.
As a result, you’ll be able to verify that the suppliers you work with today — and the ones you’re considering for the future — follow your business rules and ingredient specifications.
2. Enhance Supply Chain Visibility
Find and implement tools that give you end-to-end visibility into your supply chain — from supplier sourcing to final delivery — so you can track and monitor progress.
For instance, when you use a centralized platform to capture supplier data, that information can be pulled into your enterprise platform automatically so you can create analytics, calculations and dashboards.
This level of visibility helps you understand what your supply chain and supplier relationships look like at all times — and where improvements may be needed.
3. Focus on Continuous Improvement
Make plans to regularly connect with your trusted suppliers to review and assess performance on both sides, provide feedback, share ideas and discuss demand forecasts and trends.
Work together to define clear objectives and KPIs that you can work toward collectively, whether they’re about:
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Defect rate
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On-time delivery
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Lead time
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Order fulfillment rate
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Cost variance
Be upfront about expectations, challenges and progress. Come together to identify hazards that may put your goals at risk and create contingency plans to reduce them.
The Tool You Need to Accelerate Engagement
Instead of manually managing supplier relationships and within all tiers of your supply chain, you can access third-party data through a TraceGains-powered platform that gathers and aggregates data from disparate suppliers in one place.
“TraceGains Gather is free, and it will reduce your workload,” explains Grunder. “Suppliers can share documents with non-TraceGains customers, and F&B companies can make it part of their contracts that suppliers provide all documentation via TraceGains. They can also utilize supplier scorecards to monitor and push suppliers to provide requested documentation. It’s the most logical way to gather and consume this information.”
With this platform, you can uncover more about your suppliers than you imagined — and do so quickly. By pulling new supplier information from the network and integrating it with data you already have, the right decision becomes obvious, even when the answer points you toward a supplier you’ve never connected or worked with.
Now you can spend less time hunting down information and more time focused on enhancing efficiency, quality and competitiveness. Learn more today.
