Amritt clients often ask us for help in offshore vendor evaluation. The analysis and assessment of suppliers, contractor or other partners who have significant operations in China, India or other emerging markets is a key reason why clients continue to engage Amritt’s global expertise.  Our senior advisors and consultants are located in both Asia and North America and we have decades of experience in developing criteria for vendor assessment and in selecting, transitioning and managing vendor relationships.

There are three Amritt Practices  or Service Areas that can help depending on your situation:

• If you are looking to evaluate engineering service providers, outsourcers,  R&D partners, product development providers, open innovation collaborators or similar skills  then you want to talk to our Global Innovation Practice, where we can help guide you relating to outsourced product development, to outsourced research, or relating to establishing and running a captive R&D center.  We have worked with small and large American and European companies to help them leverage technical talent from China, India and other emerging economies.

• If your needs are to evaluate offshore vendors of products, materials, ingredients or services,  please turn to our Sourcing Practice where we have wide and deep experience in evaluating your entire global supply chain.  Since 2010, many western clients have approached us due to concerns about overdependence on China sourcing and the risk of currency fluctuation, rising labor costs and possible political risks. We can evaluate your product mix from current vendors and help you select the low-hanging fruit where you can diversify your supply chain to include additional countries or partners.

• If you are in the aerospace or defense business or are in the business of building large civilian infrastructure projects (bridges, power plants, ports), you may need to offer countertrade or offset relationships with suppliers in India as a condition of winning the business. Look at offset advisory service.

Regardless of your area of interest your next step should be  to contact us with an outline of your current situation and your needs.

 Supplier Screen

Amritt’s  proprietary Supplier Screen process is a proprietary methodology to enable best matching between client needs and vendor capability.

Step 1: The process begins with understanding the essence of the client’s needs and a clear articulation of how and why external expertise is sought.

Step 2 is a Coarse Screen Scan and Filter of available options and geographies. In some case this may go beyond the client’s initial request. For example we proposed to include Mexico in a search where the client was thinking primarily about China, Vietnam and India. At this stage we don’t generally reveal anything about the client’s identity.
Based on an iteration with the client, we then run a Fine Screen Filter in Step 3.

Step 3 In some case we start to reveal more information about the client to suppliers to encourage them to share far greater details about their own operations and priorities. We may also ask the suppliers for references and business/financial details if appropriate.

Step 4 takes us to a detailed evaluation of suppliers that survive screening in the previous step. At this point we may meet the suppliers in person as needed, unless we are already very familiar with them. We rate and rank the suppliers customized to the criteria developed in Step 1 and modified since.

In Step 5  we are ready to have three way conversations, meetings and negotiations between supplier and client facilitated by our cross-cultural expertise and where applicable by out technology expertise.

While the details of the five step process are a trade secret, the general approach is time tested over 25 years of industry experience by senior Amritt advisors based in North America and in Asia.