What's a preferred supplier?

First, does this candidate have a systematic way in assessing suppliers and making sourcing decisions? If a candidate says yes and she uses a set of criteria such as quality, cost, delivery, technology and service, then the question becomes how do you apply them in the real cases? Many professionals often don't necessarily have a consistent way to apply them. For example, how to consistently measure cost competitiveness? What weight shall be applied to each factor when it comes to rating multiple suppliers? How to minimize the people factor in making sourcing decisions? Although supply management is often more an art than a science, it is very beneficial to have a systematic way to quantify various factors, and then bake your professional judgment into sourcing decisions, not the opposite. Very often, we found organizations do the opposite when it comes to China sourcing. Supply management has their desire in cost competitiveness, quality department cares mostly about quality and Engineering simply doesn't want to change a thing as any changes involve risks. While each function has their legitimate concerns and desires, without a systematic way to factor all these into quantitative analysis, China sourcing initiatives can easily become a political battlefield. Your China sourcing team shall be able to drive the quantitative analysis and lay a common foundation for organizational alignment before it becomes an opinionated debate. 

Second, can a candidate link the performance to a supplier's fundamentals, which are its people, processes and systems? Any supplier performance metrics are results, not causes. If a candidate only sees the results, she is one degree away from the root causes and can be short sighted. What if you don't have much performance data to start with, a typical scenario for most China sourcing initiatives? A great professional can predict a supplier's performance based on how it treats its people, develops its processes and builds its systems. For example, is the supplier ISO certified? If yes, is it certified on paper only to impress its customers or does it truly embrace the ISO quality standards? It doesn't take much to verify for a seasoned professional when she gets into the shop; however, it indeed requires years of hands on experience in the field. Further, how does the supplier balance between relying on processes and people? We all know small suppliers are often people driven instead of process/ system driven; however, we don't want them to be person dependent, and we want our China sourcing team be able to identify that.

Throughout of years, we found candidates that worked predominantly for small companies tend to focus more on the performance itself, while big companies' employees more often try to get to the fundamental people, process and system issues. This is understandable as for small companies, employees often have to cover many functions and therefore can lack the in-depth knowledge about a particular function, while large employers can afford more specialization. For hiring managers, it depends on their business needs if they want to have a generalist or specialist for their China sourcing initiatives. For example, we have a $50M client and their need is very much a generalist to run everything in China for them from sourcing to logistics to supply planning; while a $3B client clearly wants a specialist to help improve the suppliers' people, processes and systems. For the $50M client, we don't refer a candidate who has spent all his life at IBM China and the only thing he did was running test equipment in an internal materials lab. For the $3B, it can be a disaster if they hire someone whose experience is primarily the one man show for a small company and knows everything for only a bit while is not an expert in any particular area.

The third thing we are looking for is how does the candidate communicate her decision making process. Communication skills are critical for any international procurement officers' success. For your China sourcing team, its task is not only find the right suppliers but also convince internal customers to make a change. It can be far more difficult to convince engineers than find the right supplier, for example. This requires not only fluent English but also logical thinking and many other soft skills. When hiring in China, a common mistake is to to attribute a candidate's inability in communicating to her lack of English proficiency. From our experience interviewing numerous candidates in China, if a candidate is not able to articulate in her broken English, very often she couldn't communicate well in Chinese either. Culture, language and personality all plays a role here. Lacking the communication skills, China sourcing team is often perceived as an execution arm and less effective in influencing positive changes. This can be detrimental and is one of the major reasons for the failure of China sourcing initiatives.

In our experience, it can take a long time to hire a professional in China. The supply chain profession is relatively new in China, and the language barrier further restricts MNCs' candidate base. As executive search consultants, we often hear cases that the positions have been open for months without being filled. We respect hiring managers' determination in hiring the right candidates, but also see business opportunities lost during the long process. The hiring can become more difficult as economy further picks up in China particularly for the high end positions.