If you’re involved with processing, you have a symbiotic relationship with purchasers in your company. They need you to create a product to accrue profit and you need them to keep maintenance items, parts and sometimes service coming to you.

It may seem as if your only job is to keep the product quality high and the productivity matched to customer demand. Granted this may be most of your responsibility, but if you work with purchasers, you can help them make great decisions instead of those based only on some of the facts. In the past, this wasn’t crucial to competitiveness. Today, though, the business climate is different.

Outsourcing and lean management as management practices have an impact on purchasing. “They increase the importance of purchasing-related knowledge in organizations,” noted Pauliina Ulkuniemi of Oulu University in a study presented a few years ago with the faculty of the university’s Economics and Business Administration.

A purchaser cannot fully evaluate the product’s utility without knowing how well it serves in the processing line.

For example, if a lubricant is used, how long will it protect wear surfaces without degrading or losing viscosity to the point where friction creates unacceptably high levels of heat? So purchasers must hear from those who work at the processing line or they need data from a sensor. A report would likely be ideal, but if there’s not time for that, then a call, a visit, an e-mailed note from anywhere, a text message or scribbled (but legible memo) helps the purchaser determine the return on investment (ROI) of the product. In this case, lubricants matter beyond wear because greater energy is needed to make poorly lubricated components slide over each other than well-lubricated parts.

Like most knowledge and feedback in business processes, this feedback from the plant floor to the purchaser is not a once-a-year responsibility. Processing line operators do well to inform purchasing any time a procured item appears to provide a shorter, or longer, service life because either will change the value equation.

In addition to service life evaluation for procured items, there is also the service component.

Let’s say you’ve ordered, received and are using a new item, and you need to change your processing line because customers have changed their demands. Now you need to know from the supplier if his or her item will work equally well as it did before.

For a good illustration of this, consider adhesives. If customers prefer a hardboard surface that’s been plasticized, will the same adhesive that worked well for a printed corrugated surface bond well to the plasticized surface coating on the corrugated? No, so you need to chat with the adhesive company representative. Make note of how long it takes to get the advice you need. Pass this data along to the purchaser. If you and the purchaser notice a pattern of long delays, it may be time to switch suppliers. After all, downtime equals not just no-profit time, but also a drain on the company, as salaries, wages, taxes, health care costs and others still must be paid.

So feedback data must be quantifiable. Now comes the more difficult part. How interested is your supplier in your company’s success? Is your supplier investing in inventing a better product for you — one that will enable you to offer products of higher quality, lower cost and require less time to ship to customers? Another factor to consider is the level of technical expertise the representative demonstrates. Is he or she aware of the latest technology advances? Is he or thinking about how they could be harnessed to enable your company to gain market share and become more profitable? Though you and purchasers can’t quantify these characteristics, you and purchasers can rank various potential suppliers by how well they would score if they were compared using these criteria.

With the trend toward companies leveraging their core competencies to make money and outsourcing all else, more than ever it is essential to manage suppliers better, even if they’re at a greater distance. When suppliers interact harmoniously with a company — here’s a thought: interacting as if they’re on the same team — then you have a leg up on the competition.