Perfecting the supplier farm system by Lyn Duncan

For those who follow professional sports, discussion surrounding the importance of developing a good “farm system” will become apparent almost immediately.

What it means to the uninitiated sports fan is that the success that professional teams experience today started a long time ago through the development of young prospects.  Specifically, the use of a farm system of graduating levels of play in which the athlete’s skills could be honed to perfection so that they could one day become productive players at the highest level of competition.

After all, Wayne Gretzky didn’t just suddenly appear in the NHL without first playing his way up through the various development leagues.  Nor did Lionel Messi break into football (soccer to our North American readers) with his first appearance being at the FIFA World Cup.

These premier athletes had to be provided with a development framework that would best position them for their ultimate success.

The same can be said for the suppliers that are today part of the cloudBuy platform.

In my two previous posts I talked about how we developed the cloudBuy embedded payment capability and the webs site/catalog points of buyer-supplier engagement.  These were critical first steps in creating the foundation for our supplier farm system.

Now some might suggest that this is no different than what Ariba did in terms of developing their Ariba Network, or Perfect Commerce’s introduction of their Open Supplier Network – both which ironically claim that they are the largest in the world.

However there are a number of distinct differences between cloudBuy’s approach to creating a supplier network – which offers more than 2.3 million products through the e-commerce sites that we helped our supplier partners create, and more than 1 million “punch-out” products – and the networks developed by other organizations.

To start, we developed our platform from the supply side of the transaction while keeping the buyer’s needs in mind.

As a result, we worked with suppliers to better align and adapt their offering to the buyers needs within the framework of their own strengths and capabilities.  This is the epitome of a truly effective supplier farm system.  Or to put it another way, it wasn’t a build first and then make suppliers adapt later approach.  It was instead a deliberate cultivation of supplier capabilities at their individual point of development with the end objective being the creation of network with a consistent standard of service delivery excellence.

Does this supplier-side approach work?

Having never heard one of our suppliers refer to themselves as prisoners – by choice or otherwise – I would have to say yes.  Nor have we ever had consumer or buyer-side complaints that had to be settled through the Better Business Bureau or, had to have a Learning and Development consultant deliver a presentation on numerous challenges including limited buyer resources and supplier refusal to enlist.  By the way, in the latter instance, Ariba actually hired the consultant who created this presentation which tells you that he was spot on in terms of his assessment.

The fact is that the foundation of our farm system of suppliers was developed organically over many, many years, as opposed to through a series of acquisitions.  This enabled cloudBuy to focus our efforts on empowering supplier capabilities to the benefit of buyers through the introduction of enhanced A to Z services, including business registration.

In the end, what has made cloudBuy successful, and positioned us to assume the leadership mantel  in the B2B world is the strength of our indigenous supplier network, in which many of our supply partners have been with us from almost the very beginning.

In the fourth and final installment in this 4 part series, I will talk about our streamlined P2P process, and how it ties all of our individual service offerings into a cohesive offering.

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