As many suppliers—and manufacturers, as well—recognize, the word ”partnership“ has different definitions at different companies. Some arrangements have little behind the word and only serve as a device to wring the best price from a supplier. In other cases, the manufacturer truly shares its business plans with its supplier to gain as much help from its organization as possible.
To identify just how intense these relationships were, the survey asked about what types of intelligence a manufacturer would share with its partner. The survey asked about whether their companies would share four increasingly confidential types of information, from package development programs to actual sales projections (Chart 3). As expected, the respondents displayed an increasing level of resistance to sharing company intelligence with supplier partners.
Before an analysis of these responses, perhaps the most important factor may be that the overall levels of resistance to sharing were so low! Frankly, PW editors had expected that only about half of the manufacturers responding would share production schedules or especially sales forecasts. Yet more than two-thirds of respondents say their companies share sales projections, and nearly eight of 10 shared production schedules.
This unexpected sharing probably means there are either more true supplier/manufacturer partnerships than are usually made public, or those involved in true partnerships may have been more likely to respond to the survey.
Even among these respondents, there were some unusual regional differences. While there was a uniformly high level of sharing of packaging development programs, there was nearly twice as much resistance to this from respondents in the West (12.5%) than any other region. On the other coast, resistance to sharing came from only 3.8% of respondents.
That same diffidence in the West was evident in the results of the question of sharing production schedules. Participants in the West said their companies were far less likely to share this information (33%) than in the East (15.4%). Respondents in the Midwest showed some reticence about production schedules; 78.3% said their companies shared these details.
When asked about whether their companies would share unit sales projections, the greatest reluctance shifted to the Midwest, where 34.8% of respondents said “no.” For this kind of company information, respondents from the East also showed a reluctance to share (32%). At the other end of the scale, respondents from companies in the South were most likely to share sales projections, with eight of 10 answering “yes.”
It’s also worthwhile to point out that there were no real statistical differences, whether respondents answered about partnerships with various types of suppliers, materials, machinery or services.
See the main story that goes with this sidebar: Supplier partnerships encouraged in purchasing
