Do you know how to review supplier performance on your construction projects?

Do you truly know how well your suppliers are performing on your construction projects? 

UK construction procurement professionals face immense pressure right now. Besides being under pressure to reduce costs, manage frequent supply chain disruption, and ensure stringent regulatory compliance with UK building legislation and regulations. When you rely on intuition rather than hard data, you open your construction projects up to severe delays and increased financial risk. 

This post explores: 

• The current pain points in construction supplier evaluation 
• The consequences of poor pre-vetting 
• How adopting a robust supplier performance management strategy can drive cost efficiency and compliance across your entire supply chain 

 

The current challenges of measuring supplier performance on construction projects 

Traditionally, construction supply chains have attempted to track performance using scattered spreadsheets, disjointed email chains, and unreturned phone calls. These manual supplier performance management processes consume vast amounts of time and often lead to lost qualitative data. 

Relying on fragmented information makes accurate supplier performance risk management nearly impossible. By the time a site manager reports a severe quality or safety issue, the project is often already behind schedule or significantly over budget. 

 

The consequences of failing to pre-vet suppliers 

Allowing unverified or underperforming subcontractors to arrive on your construction site carries severe financial and operational impacts. With up to 11 subcontractors going insolvent each day in the UK, early risk detection is critical. 

Failing to monitor supplier performance leads to costly delays and poor project delivery. It also opens your business up to potential legal ramifications regarding non-compliance with the Building Safety Act or ISO 9001 Clause 8.4. You need to know exactly who you are working with before they step foot on site. 

 

Proactively manage risk with supplier performance management 

Once For All’s supplier performance management software provides the definitive solution to manual guesswork. It helps teams drive significant cost efficiency, ensure stringent regulatory compliance, and champion sustainability initiatives. 

Our Supplier Performance Management solution features: 

• Clear dashboards: instantly see how well suppliers have performed on past projects 
• Automated survey distribution: select the project managers you want to get responses from 
• Built-in AI analysis that instantly summarises qualitative feedback: too much information? Use AI to quickly identify risks or summaries of your KPIs. Easily define and track any specific supplier performance KPI that matters to your business, such as health and safety records, commercial awareness, quality assurance, and on-time delivery 
• Subject rating scales: provides data quality. Built-in Likert scale rating (Strong Disagree up to Strongly Agree) helps construction users gauge how project managers felt on-site with the suppliers 

 

Capturing direct feedback from project managers 

Our software simplifies the feedback loop by sending tailored, automated questionnaires directly to project managers and site teams. Project managers can rate suppliers they’ve worked with from one to 10 in just a few clicks. 

This eliminates the usual administrative burden and ensures accurate, real-time data collection. This direct line of feedback allows supply chain managers to centralise supplier data and effortlessly create customisable scorecards. 

For instance, using a Likert scale rating of ‘strongly disagree’ up to ‘Strongly agree’ makes it easier for users to understand the project managers’ feelings on-site. Combined with the AI summary feature, they can piece together the kinds of suppliers they could work with, based on their KPIs of interest. 

 

Who is Supplier Performance Management built for? 

Various construction stakeholders benefit from dedicated supplier performance management solutions. Our solution predominantly helps: 

• Procurement and supply chain managers 
• Project and construction managers 
• Supply chain risk managers 
• Commercial managers 
• Quantity surveyors 
• Estimators 
• Operations directors 
• Compliance managers 

Using Supplier Performance Management to its full potential can help these users get the feedback they need, with data-backed insights to support their decision-making on which suppliers to work with on their next project. 

Want to see Supplier Performance Management in action? 

 

Seamless integration for a leaner procurement process 

This tool integrates perfectly with Once For All’s existing construction supply chain and risk management solutions. This interconnected approach gives you a leaner, more efficient way to assess potential partners. Gain a top-down view of your entire supply chain, allowing you to mitigate contagion risk and drive consistent profitability. 

Tired of using disjointed software to manage your supply chain compliance and risk? Speak to our team. 

 

Key takeaways 

• Transition from manual spreadsheets to automated, data-driven supplier evaluations with our Supplier Performance Management software 
• Mitigate project delays and compliance risks by identifying underperforming suppliers early 
• Tailor your KPIs to align with your specific commercial, environmental, and safety goals 
• Integrate performance data with your wider supply chain management strategy to achieve substantial cost savings 

 

FAQs 

What is supplier performance management software? 

It is a digital tool used to monitor and evaluate the quantitative performance of subcontractors against agreed KPIs, replacing manual spreadsheets with real-time data. 

How do I define a supplier performance KPI? 

You should base your KPIs on construction-specific metrics that impact your bottom line and safety records. Examples include defect rates, delivery times, and compliance adherence. 

What is the difference between supplier performance management and supplier relationship management? 

Performance management focuses on tracking hard data and metrics. This objective data then forms the foundation for effective qualitative relationship management.