22 June 2006

Building relationships with your suppliers is vital to drive innovation in your supply chain. And leaders in the field underpin this with a long-term purchasing strategy, research has found.

Benn Lawson, lecturer in operations management at Queen's University Belfast, presented his findings to delegates. He said: "Companies are generating value from supplier integration but have not yet perfected the process to implement it."

Fostering these "soft" elements, such as on-site visits and cross-functional teams, creates a "stock of goodwill" that can help clients and suppliers to exchange ideas.

Lawson found 38 per cent of firms surveyed had a long-range plan for innovation in the supply chain, with half of these plans detailing the relationships they wanted to create with suppliers.

Lawson quizzed 111 purchasing managers for the study. The full report will be available on the CIPS website in July.

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