Right relationship reaps rewards

At FSL we pride ourselves on the excellent working relationships we've developed over 30 years with our clients and suppliers. It's helped us gain four consecutive SC21 Bronze awards and a 99.3% right first time accuracy rate and 98.1% rate for on time in full deliveries.

It's this reputation that led Concept Solutions to ask us in February 2014 to trial score the new Relationship Excellence programme - a new element of SC21, which goes live in April 2016.

RelEx is an eight-step diagnostic tool, modelled on the BS11000 Standard, designed to establish the readiness of an organisation to engage in collaborative working relationships across the whole supply chain – which means both clients and suppliers.

Many companies naturally tend to focus on the relationship they have with their client and the relationship with the supplier tends to takes a back seat. After all, it's the client that pays the bills. However, RelEx encourages companies to focus on their relationship with both. To me this makes good business sense. Put simply, if your suppliers aren't performing, your clients won't be happy!

So why did Concept Solutions approach us to trial RelEx? At the risk of banging FSL's own drum, the processes we've developed for managing our relationship with our suppliers and clients are regarded as best practice by many in the industry. Indeed, in the past six months we've had four companies visit us to see how we manage the whole supply chain.

What's our secret? To be fair, it's not rocket science, but it does involve excellent IT systems, industry-savvy employees and a strict checking and processing system which ensures we run a tight ship. This means we can supply a consistently high quality product, that's competitively priced, delivered on-time with fantastic customer service.

Each year we identify our top 25 suppliers based on value of spend and volume of product supplied. Each supplier is then monitored on quality, delivery, enquiries quoted and progressing response time. We then rate them into our own gold, silver or bronze categories. Suppliers tell us it incentivises them to improve and they are very keen to win the gold, silver and bronze award certificates which are issued each quarter.

We also carry out supplier risk assessments and development plans annually. We're in regular telephone and email contact with our top suppliers and clients, visiting them regularly to agree key targets and joint objectives. We also look at ourselves and ask if there is anything we can do to improve the suppliers' performance and our clients' experience dealing with us.

We've found this collaborative approach engages our suppliers and makes for excellent working relationships, helping to avoid any supply chain hiccups so we can guarantee the best result for our clients.

This September we are due to be re-scored on RelEx. Each FSL employee has a Key Area of Responsibility which is directly linked to the company's primary business measures, driving improved performance throughout our supply chain. Whilst there is a huge leap between the SC21 bronze and silver awards, we're hoping we've performed consistently high in quality, delivery and in our relationships with suppliers and clients to secure a silver award. Watch this space!

www.fslaerospace.co.uk