We live in a world of give and take. In the business world, that comes in the form of suppliers and customers. Ball Systems falls in an interesting place in this world, as we have suppliers who have suppliers as well as customers who have customers. There are a lot of layers to doing the business that we do, and that’s why we have a concentrated effort to improve not only relations with our customers, but our suppliers as well.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been tasked with further developing our supplier chain as well as improving how we work with the suppliers that we already have. For years, we’ve had a pre-qualification form so that we know what we’re getting into when we enter a relationship with new vendors. There are important things to know, like the sourcing of products, quality certificates, as well as things like return policies and minimum order quantities. However, we’ve recently been developing an update to this to form a stronger basis for a relationship with the supplier. We’ve decided to include questions like “What are your company’s areas of focus?” and “How can we best work with you to help further both of our companies?” This allows us to more accurately refine who we send to and not spend time sending a request for quote to a company that doesn’t do a specific type of work.This is just one example of our improving supplier development process that is focusing on maintaining and growing supplier relations as well as having a consistent supply line.

But the real question is, how does this effect you, our customer? At Ball Systems we believe in working with and for our customers, and a big part of that is our supply line – both custom and component. The fact of the matter is that we can’t do what we do without the support of other companies. The stronger our relationship with our suppliers, the more accurate, consistent, and timely our product delivery will be to our customers.

We constantly aim to be better for both our customers and suppliers. This includes both an external and internal focus, and Ball Systems is always learning and growing how best to work in both of those worlds. We hope that you’ll see that in our everyday work.

Interested in learning more about what we do for our customers?