A Supplier Scorecard You Can Run in a Spreadsheet

For a long time our supplier ranking lived in one person's head. That works until that person is on holiday and a reorder needs a decision.

What replaced it is deliberately small: five columns, weights that sum to one hundred, and a rule that a supplier has to be scored twice before the number counts.

The five columns

• On-time rate (weight 30) — shipments that left within the confirmed window, over the last twelve
• Defect rate (weight 25) — major plus critical defects per thousand units
• Spec fidelity (weight 20) — did the delivered goods match the approved sample without a rework loop
• Response time (weight 15) — median hours to a substantive reply, not to an acknowledgement
• Documentation (weight 10) — packing list, inspection report, and photos arriving complete and on time

The weights are opinionated on purpose. On-time and defect rate together carry more than half because those two decide whether a reorder is safe.

The two-scoring rule

A single score is noise. A supplier can have one bad month for reasons outside their control, and one good month because nothing was difficult. Scoring at the point of each shipment and averaging over at least two gives a number stable enough to act on.

We keep the raw events, not just the average, because the reason behind a miss matters more than the miss.

What it changed

Two suppliers we thought were strong turned out to be strong on price and weak on documentation. One we had written off scored well once the sample-size problem was fixed. Neither conclusion was available from memory.

The scorecard only works if the underlying records exist. Our notes on sourcing desks versus Alibaba and on the China sourcing guide describe the two records that feed most of the columns.

Start small

Five columns and a rule about sample size beats a twelve-factor model nobody fills in.

---

Written by Zhao Jin, sales at Yiwu Jinji Trading Company (King Squishy), a Yiwu-based supplier of wholesale squishy and fidget toys working with partner workshops. [e-mail] · WhatsApp [phone].