China Recruiting Blog

Staying Out of Both Sourcing Ditches and a Market Opening Too

The Procurement Leaders have a great  blog up especially if you like the Wright Brothers. Take a look at the whole thing here.

They note that complicated SLA’s ultimately mean that important things are not focused on enough.  Well said.

I also think we need to consider our life here in China.  Simplifying contracts is good generally, but the Devil is in the Details. We must not just believe that the supplier will not use cancer causing materials to reach our KPI for performance for example.  We must specify and not assume anything especially in our BOM.

So one ditch is a too simple contract that does not specify everything clearly.  The other ditch is a contract that has details but no clear goals for performance that encourage suppliers to stretch within very clearly defined boundaries.

An aside is that the cancerous milk story I linked to above that came out 6 months ago was the last straw for many middle class families in China. They no longer trust Chinese companies on quality and safety anymore.  Product sales to China are now open season, and if we are smart, we can do good sourcing without being in either ditch.

Anything to add?