STRATEGIC MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS OF SUPPLIER SEGMENTATION IN THE CURRENT COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT

Supplier segmentation represents now a strategic approach for companies with a great number of suppliers. Rather than dealing with each supplier separately, the buyer can establish a set of rules for interacting with each set of suppliers. But the segmentation and assignment of each supplier to a different group might not turn into an easy task. The fact that must retain the attention of buying specialists is that these kind of tools, whether simple or more complicated, are now at hand for everybody and, if they don’t have the means to recur to a more complicated method, they can always use the principle laying at the basis of these approaches and design a method of their own.