The Return of Supplier Relationship Management
Dylan Persaud - July 13, 2007

As the year 2000 approached, the catchphrase "lean manufacturing" was loosely thrown around in manufacturing industries. The media and software vendors led organizations to believe that a supplier relationship management (SRM) system could achieve the promise of lean. Yet the benefits promised by SRM systems were not kept. As organizations matured, they realized how the benefits were interrelated. Information sharing, sourcing, purchasing, and supplier relationships could translate into increased customer satisfaction and control of global spend. How to efficiently predict consumer demand was beginning to come into focus. As organizations realized the need for these separate functionalities, they started to look toward a solution that would combine these tasks. Enter SRM...