2022 has been supplier diversity’s biggest year yet, with the community in the spotlight in ways it never has been before.
The 2022 State of Supplier Diversity Report shows that executive engagement is at an all-time high, with 61% of respondents reporting that their CEO is actively engaged with the program.
With this increased support for supplier diversity, the time is ripe to capitalize on executive engagement to optimize your program. To get the best results, you need to learn to speak the language of the business and deliver the data most vital to your executive team: hard metrics, clear tracking, accountability, and accurate reporting.
Here are some tips to make sure your tracking, metrics, and reporting systems are boardroom ready.
Create Clear and Actionable Goals
The first and best step for any supplier diversity program is to set clear goals and accountability measures. After all, what gets measured gets done.
Having a solid plan for your program helps keep your team focused and aligned with your company’s overall objectives.
Here are some questions to keep in mind as you goal-set:
What are your strategic goals for supplier diversity? Will you leverage supplier diversity to impact your bottom line? Your local economic impact? How closely do your program’s goals align with your organization’s overall goals? What is your CEO’s top priority for your company?
Identify What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) You’ll Track
As soon as you’ve outlined your goals, the next step is to determine which metrics you’ll use as KPIs to evaluate your progress. The most common KPIs used to measure supplier diversity initiatives are:
- Diverse Spend: How much money your company is spending with diverse suppliers.
- Diverse Count: The number of diverse suppliers that your company contracts with.
- Economic Impact: How doing business impacts the economy, specifically the local economy where your suppliers are located and do business.
- Cost Savings: The ratio of organizational spending to revenue over time.
- Revenue Impact: Your program’s impact on revenue earned and projected.
- Market Share: Your company’s sales in relation to the overall revenue of your industry.
- Deals Won: How many diverse suppliers were contracted within the stipulated time frame. You can also compare this metric to churn or the number of diverse suppliers that left your company during the same period.
- Deals Lost (Due to Disqualified Suppliers): If you’re losing many deals because suppliers don’t meet your qualification criteria, then you may be aiming your marketing and outreach efforts at the wrong audience. Partnering with a third party like supplier.io can provide access to a list of diverse suppliers in your desired industry and geographic area.
When you’ve chosen which metrics to track, consistency is key. Changes won’t happen overnight—if you change which metrics you’re tracking or don’t follow a strict reporting cadence, it will be much harder to track your growth and gain the insight you need to grow and improve your supplier diversity program.
Establish a Baseline
To track your progress and set reasonable goals, you need to know your starting point. Look through your current supplier portfolio and identify baseline figures for each metric that you’ve chosen to track.
supplier.io’s data enrichment tools can help you establish your baseline with the most comprehensive and accurate certified supplier diversity data on the planet.
Don’t just establish your baseline against your own data, however. Benchmarking against your peers is vital to getting an accurate idea of where your program stands in the grand scheme of things, and where you might actually be performing better than you think.
Draw Insight from Data
When you’ve gathered your current data and established a baseline, you need a consistent and efficient means of organizing and analyzing incoming data.
Supplier diversity tracking software helps you automate this process, making it easier to draw insights to help optimize your organizational spending, improve your diverse contracting efforts, and hone the impact of your program.
Additionally, automatic tracking limits the pitfalls of manual tracking systems, like Excel sheets. When your data is automatically updated and comprehensive, you don’t risk working with faulty data that can throw your goals off-balance.
Conclusion
To cement your program as a vital part of your organization worthy of investment and cultivation, you’ll need to have the robust data and hard metrics that your CEO will be expecting to see.
The best way to have accurate, boardroom ready data is to eliminate manual processes wherever you can. When you automate your data collection, you ensure that you’re never left with partial data, or partial credit for all your hard work.
Ready to get started? Don’t know where to start? Book a consultation with one of our sales representatives today and learn more about how to build a world-class supplier diversity program.