GroundWorks · Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)
Reviews end in commitments someone accepted, and the next review starts from what happened to them.
Bring scorecards, actions, reviews and innovation opportunities into one accountable supplier rhythm.
The Workblock
Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) · GroundWorks Alliance
- Will this change the decision and the follow-through, or just add another supplier screen?
- Supplier performance and innovation system of work
- 1 reference / 0 defined / 4 roadmap
Modules
- Supplier performance review: Assemble scorecards, narrative, actions and minutes for a governed review cycle.
- Supplier innovation pipeline: Capture, assess and progress supplier ideas against business needs and measured value.
- Supplier segmentation and governance: Maintain evidence-based segment assignments and provision the cadence, roles and controls each relationship requires.
- Supplier performance tracking and corrective action: Normalise observations, maintain dimensional scorecards and progress material issues through corrective action and verified efficacy.
- Supplier relationship and joint-value planning: Maintain shared objectives, relationship plans, collaboration projects and joint-value handoffs linked to their source records.
The question, answered
The meeting then spends senior attention on reconciliation instead of decisions. A favourable average can sit on top of a critical service failure. The supplier disputes a number and nobody can open the source behind it. Actions go into the minutes, but a minuted action is not an agreed one: the person expected to do the work may never have accepted it. By the next review, someone is reconstructing what happened to last quarter's actions from email.
Supplier ideas travel a similar path with higher stakes. An idea arrives in a meeting or an inbox, gathers enthusiasm, and loses its business need, its sponsor or its confidentiality terms before anyone with authority decides anything. The whole domain rests on keeping five records apart: the score, the evidence behind it, the decision, the commitment and the idea. Wherever two of them collapse, follow-through dies.
Will this change the decision and the follow-through, or just add another supplier screen?
The question is fair: the work before a strategic supplier review is already heavy. Contract, operations, quality, finance, risk and sustainability teams extract data from their own systems. An analyst reconciles supplier identifiers, periods and formulas in a workbook. The relationship manager drafts a scorecard and a deck, then chases internal agreement.
What changes
The review arrives as a decision package: every score opens into its method, sources and freshness, critical exceptions sit beside the average, and the proposed conclusion waits for the owner to accept, edit or reject it.
An action stays proposed until the responsible buyer or supplier owner accepts it. Closed means a named reviewer accepted the closure evidence; weak evidence reopens the action instead of erasing its history.
From scorecard to decision package
An analyst reconciles extracts into a workbook, the relationship manager builds a deck, and the reviewer still hunts for the source behind every disputed number.
From minuted actions to accepted commitments
Actions live in minutes, decks and email threads. Done means someone ticked a task, and the next review starts by reconstructing what happened.
The principles it holds to
Five records, kept apart
A score is a result under a named method. Evidence is what supports or challenges it. A decision is an authorised conclusion. A commitment is work someone accepted, with an owner and closure evidence. An idea is a proposal and nothing more. Collapse any two and the review starts trading in false certainty.
An average never hides a critical failure
A favourable total can coexist with a failed hard obligation. Critical conditions stay visible beside the aggregate, with their own route to a decision. Missing evidence shows as unavailable: never as zero, and never as on target.
Interest is not commitment
A supplier idea earns attention, not authority. Receipt is not endorsement, a positive meeting is not funding, and a stage decision grants only the next bounded step. The supplier hears a truthful status either way.
The records it authors
Supplier innovation case. A governed supplier innovation opportunity carrying the need, provisional value and risk hypotheses, stage evidence, experiment plan, authority decision and measured outcome.
Supplier performance review. A versioned supplier review that binds atomic observations and a scorecard definition to a proposal, stakeholder and supplier input, an authorised decision and corrective follow-through.
Supplier joint-value plan. An effective-dated relationship plan containing shared objectives, mutual commitments, milestones, governance, linked innovation and validated outcome references, with proposal and committed plan versions kept distinct.
Supplier segment assignment. An effective-dated assignment of a supplier to a relationship segment and criticality band with supporting records attached, keeping the machine proposal separate from the committed governance control.
Supplier performance observation. An atomic, source-linked supplier performance fact for a defined measure, scope and period, preserving correction and data-quality state separately from breach interpretation.
Case records
Durable, owned units of work. Each one holds the condition that opened it, the evidence gathered against it, the proposed action and the committed disposition, and it stays open until the condition is answered.
Decision records
Determinations and the proposals that precede them, each pinned to the exact policy, rule and evidence versions it was made against, and each kept structurally distinct from the action it authorises.
Control records
The governed rules, grants and pre-commitment assessments that bound what may be committed, on which records and by whom.
Metric records
Measured facts and versioned results, each carrying the measure, the scope and the period it was calculated over.
The roles it serves
Execution flow and task definitions are not published. The dossiers name what each Workblock owns and how much of it there is; the definitions themselves travel with a delivery.
Workblocks can be versioned and changed independently, enabling continuous client tailoring.
Supplier relationship manager
Own the supplier review from scope to follow-through: the narrative, the meeting and what happens to the actions afterwards. Can I defend this review line by line, and show what happened to the actions we agreed?
Supplier-governance owner
Set the review policy: segmentation, cadence, measure methods and escalation across the supplier portfolio. Do our scores mean the same thing across suppliers, and would they survive an audit?
Metric or data owner
Own the measure definitions and the observations behind them: source, formula, period, corrections and data-quality state. Which score used my data, and was it the method and period we agreed?
Supplier account lead
Represent the supplier in the review: explain results, bring evidence, dispute facts and accept supplier commitments within documented delegation. What did we actually agree to, and what evidence closes it?
Innovation sponsor
Own the business need behind a supplier idea and sponsor its evaluation through to a stage decision. Which ideas deserve my time, and what exactly does the next stage authorise?
Module maturity
1 reference / 0 defined / 4 roadmap, of this Workblock's five business modules.
The rest of the register
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A payment queue where every exception carries its records and its owner.
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A savings number finance can trace to the records that produced it.
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