How Do You Know How Good You Are?

I have interacted with a lot of China importers. I like to think of these guys as adventurers, entrepreneurs – even if they are corporate – because they dare to go where most fear to tread. Most of these people have an admirably high level of confidence and many of them have 2 things in common: (1) China sourcing is very important to their business model and (2) they have a really good system in place to manage it.

But I often wonder: “How do they know?” What standards do they use when they evaluate their own management performance? I feel this is important because if one can securely make a 10% improvement on the management of their China sourcing, that will often make a huge impact on their bottom line.

Until now, there was no way to evaluate China sourcing management performance. But CPG’s “Management Check up” is an intriguing, clever way to do this. It asks pointed questions on key buying topics and provides a choice of 4 answers for each. The whole exercise only takes a few minutes and you get an automatic score. All this anonymously. Discreet and really neat.

The point of this is that there is a direct correlation between the score one gets and how much “money one leaves on the table” in China. So “it pays to know”. In other words, if the score improves, it means one’s China sourcing operation is becoming more valuable.

In the month of February, the average score was only 42 out of a possible 88. Where do you score?

By Guerschom Francois