Our goal is to manage every penny of every dollar that we spend with our suppliers, be they raw material suppliers, freight suppliers, or indirect. We want to touch every penny.

We have made some progress influencing the sourcing decision that our customers make. There are a growing number of examples of where we participated in the customer design and development and made recommendations about suppliers. The customer allowed us to make sourcing decisions on their behalf.

Now we are a lot more efficient at collecting and aggregating spend information by supplier, by commodity, by customer, by product.

The SAP system has afforded us a lot of visibility and access to information that we didn't have before. We were on at least three different materials resource planning (MRP) systems. Access to information and the ability to analyze the information was limited, at best.

They can tell us what are some of the poor practices that we are imposing on them that make the cost of doing business with us higher. What is impeding their ability to provide low total cost of ownership? How can we identify and reduce waste and eliminate errors in our processes? How do we get rid of inventory that is not value added?

We expect suppliers to be as committed as we are to our customer's success. We have to get a total package of value from our suppliers that meet or exceed our customer's expectations.