Deciding to focus on the overall success of your suppliers so that they can be more impactful for you is really an investment in your own institution!
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Developing your diverse suppliers is more than a nice to-do — it’s a business imperative.
We all know that social responsibility can be expressed in terms of eco-friendliness — doing the right things, and doing things right (we also call this “effectiveness and efficiency”) — especially when it comes to saving the earth. But we often overlook the fact that developing our diverse suppliers is an important aspect of our social responsibility as well. And it’s about more than just sponsoring a diversity and inclusion conference, meeting, or lunch.
A real focus on supplier diversity means taking the time to make an impactful difference in your diverse suppliers’ growth and scale. This can have lasting implications for your university, as well as other universities and corporations across industry lines. In addition, the effect you have on the supplier you develop is priceless.
We’ve all heard that old cliché: what goes around, comes around. When diverse suppliers developed by other universities end up benefiting you by adopting quality standards, best practices, and implementing lessons learned, they pay it forward to you by being competitive, qualified, and capable of delivering the excellence you are looking for. You can call this karma, or simply a return on your investment in doing your part to contribute to the overall impact our diverse suppliers make when we invest in them.
How many times have you asked a diverse supplier: “Have you done business with any other colleges or universities?” We ask this because the decision other universities make when contracting for similar services matters to us. Oftentimes, because the supplier has the experience of working with another university, we believe they can and will deliver for ours.
Deciding to focus on the overall success of your suppliers so that they can be more impactful for you is really an investment in your own institution!
Veronica Cook-Euell, M.A., M.B.A., M.Ed is the Supplier Diversity Program Manager at Kent State University. She is responsible for developing strategies to increase minority business representation in securing contracts, driving supplier diversity initiatives, and serving as an advocate and a liaison for diverse suppliers. She can be reached at vcook3@kent.edu.
