
Why bothering making a supplier scorecard?
- Make analysis and rational decisions
- Improve your supplier base
- Generate savings and value for your organization
- Get internal recognition of management: implement an efficient and transparent system
But above all, once you start using it, you wonder why you did not do it earlier…
What is a supplier scorecard?
As usual, we should trust our Wikipedia to give good insights. But it seems it is poorly structured on this aspect. You have to pick from Performance indicator and from SRM. You can even read Supplier Risk Management. However, none of them are really 1st in class Wikipedia articles by the time I am writing this post.
But in a way, the articles’ titles describe what this is about, and would support my definition:
A Supplier Scorecard is a structured overview of indicators of supplier performance. Those indicators are both qualitative and quantitative, displayed as an overview mixing graphics and figures. They offer a 360 degree view of the supplier performance over a period of time. Supplier Scorecard purpose is to manage the supplier, mitigate risks and optimize spend and profit.

A supplier scorecard in Excel is a graphical view of supplier performance along different criteria. You give score for all criteria defined. Then you report them onto a dashboard: the scorecard.
A supplier scorecard spreadsheet is defined by categories of criteria (Logistics, Financial,…), criteria (OTIF, Payment terms,…) and weights (Payment terms weight = 1, Currency USD weight = 2,…). This is an objective way of measuring performance of a supplier based on commonly accepted and transparent indicators. And this is valid across supplier categories.
Where to download the template:
Go directly at the bottom section of this article.
Vendor vs Supplier
By the way, you will note I use indifferently vendor or supplier, as this is kind of branch specific or regional which one you use. Vendor has a higher Supply Chain background, while Supplier is tending more towards strategic procurement and trading. Anyway what I am going to share with you, is all but branch specific. You may look here for more details.
I personally tend to prefer using the word supplier to the word vendor. However since I am not native speaker and since I have a long track record in trading, it may have no meaning and I can be wrong… Above all, this does not impact the supplier performance scorecard template excel I am sharing with you.