How to Maximize Your Supplier Relationships to Minimize Cash Burn
Don't let supply chain management challenges lead to cash burn. Discover how to maximize your supplier relationships and boost your bottom line with Anvyl.
How to Maximize Your Supplier Relationships to Minimize Cash Burn
The quality of your supplier relationships has always been massively influential to the success of your supply chain. But as businesses prepare for a possible recession and take action to safeguard their financial health, supplier relationship management has taken on even more value.
Why? Because there are very real – and very significant – financial benefits to developing strong partnerships with your supplier base. We’ll explore some of the ways these close connections can boost brands’ profitability. But first let’s examine how difficult it currently is to maintain these relationships.
Indeed, the same challenges that have thrown supply chain managers for a loop these past few years – whether it be the impact of historic inflation and colossal materials shortages, or even an unexpected and entirely unpredictable event like the Suez Canal blockage – have also been a catalyst for supplier-buyer fallouts. In fact, when Anvyl surveyed over 400 SMB owners and C-Suite executives in Q1, they found that over half (56%) were forced to switch suppliers in the past year, with consistent delays and costs being the primary reasons why.
Understanding the value of every dollar in today’s economic landscape is crucial to maximize your supplier relationships and improve your financial health. Before we cover this, let’s take a look at how supplier relationships boost a brand’s bottom line.
The Impact Of Great Supplier Relationships On Your Bottom Line
There are many ways strong supplier relationships influence your financial health. These include:
- Lowering Costs: Businesses that have strong relationships with their suppliers may have greater success negotiating better prices and payment terms, which can help lower the cost of goods sold and improve profitability.
- Optimizing Cash Flow: Supplier relationships can also impact cash flow – a crucial benefit for brands in a recession when the movement of cash typically slows down. For example, if a business has a good relationship with its suppliers, it may be able to negotiate longer payment terms or receive early payment discounts. On the other hand, if a business has a poor relationship with its suppliers, it may have to pay higher prices or face penalties for late payments, which can negatively impact cash flow.
- Increasing Product Quality: Believe it or not, supplier relationships can also affect the quality of a business’s products. Maintaining a good relationship with a supplier may open you up to higher-quality materials or components, which can help to improve the quality of products.
- Overcoming Supply Chain Disruptions: An element of supplier relationships that’s skyrocketed in importance in recent years: great supplier partnerships can help brands minimize the risk of supply chain disruptions. For instance, you may be able to receive early access to supplies or receive advance warning of potential delays, enabling you to take action accordingly.
Turning Supplier Relationships Into Cash
With a clear understanding of the financial benefits of supplier relationships, let’s now explore some things you can do to reap their rewards.
Negotiate Volume Discounts
We already touched on why you should negotiate prices. Now, let’s explain when and how you should break out your negotiation skills to save some money. Of course, suppliers need to protect their profit margins, too, so they’re not going to give just anyone a price decrease.
But a great way to entice them to do so is by negotiating a volume discount. This means purchasing larger quantities of goods, and then securing lower per-unit prices from your suppliers. In turn, you can then offer more competitive prices to your customers, and boost your profits.
Consolidate Shipping Containers
Consolidating shipping containers involves combining multiple smaller shipments into a single container. There are a huge number of benefits to doing this. For one, it can help you reduce transportation costs and streamline the shipping process.
This includes the door it opens for brands to negotiate better rates with shipping companies, further reducing costs. Secondly, consolidation can help boost supply chain efficiency by reducing the risk of products getting lost or damaged during transit. And thirdly, it can help minimize the environmental impact of shipping by reducing the overall number of containers required.
To do this, though, you and your suppliers need to be willing to work collaboratively since you’ll both need to adjust production schedules to align with shipping timelines. Indeed, the level of collaboration and communication between a brand and its suppliers is crucial in determining whether or not consolidation is a viable option.
Open Up a Line of Credit
A great way to optimize cash management is to open up a Growth Line of Credit with Ampla which allows you to increase your access to capital when you need it. This can be especially useful for businesses that have seasonal or fluctuating cash flows or those that are typically tight on cash. In addition, it can give you greater flexibility in managing your inventory levels and help you overcome any unforeseen supply chain demands.
Along with our Growth Line of Credit, you can take advantage of our high-yield bank account designed specifically for consumer brands with 4.73% APY on all deposits.
Optimizing Your Supplier Relationships With Anvyl
Having strategic supplier relationships in place is essential to your business’s success. At Anvyl, we help our customers build these crucial partnerships through our leading intelligent purchase order (PO) management platform. Moreover, as the global supply chain continues to fluctuate, make it easy to keep track of all supplier communications – including correspondence about pricing, delivery dates, or purchase order updates – from one centralized platform.
This means no more cross-referencing emails and phone calls, or relying on outdated spreadsheets to track milestones. Instead, Anvyl acts as your single source of truth, bringing full transparency and real-time visibility to your global supply chain, from purchase order through delivery to your warehouse.