Identification of Supplier Evaluation Criteria for Improving Vendor’s Offering

The more dynamic and connected the world becomes, the more complex markets become for companies. In today´s world companies approaching new markets have to adapt their offering in order to meet the requirement of potential customers. Customers commonly have a set of criteria to evaluate suppliers in order to select the vendor that is more appealing for them. The criteria to evaluate suppliers have been studied extensively; nevertheless little research has been done in order to identify the criteria to evaluate bulk material suppliers. This thesis is intended to address such topic and it will be based on a case company who needs to improve its current offering in order to attract new customers. The main research question of this study is how to improve bulk material suppliers’ offering based on the key criteria to evaluate vendors. In this sense, this study initially identifies what is the current offering of the case company, and later on through a series of interviews and literature research it identifies what is the criteria to evaluate bulk material suppliers. Based on those aspects, a suggestion is given for the case company to improve its offering with the purpose of matching the identified criteria. As a result, this thesis identified that quality, price, delivery time and historical performance are the key criteria to evaluate bulk material suppliers. That finding was the result of an interview held with 10 companies operating in 4 different industries. Moreover, in order to improve the existing offering it was suggested to first highlight the good quality of the products offered by the case company when approaching new customers. Secondly, a person should be assigned to oversee the delivery process and communication with the customers, as it was identified that those are issues that the case company has had in the past. Thirdly, two extra services should be added to its current offering: engineering and installation. The engineering service aims to provide support when it comes to designing and planning piping arrangements, whereas the installation service aims to provide the workforce to install the purchased items. Lastly, it was suggested to approach initially potential customer with the updated offering in the manufacture of paper and paper products industry, as respondents in this industry are more likely to be impressed by the updated offering