vendor rating
supplier rating

A vendor rating exercise had the Spondon-based business performing best overall in areas such as technical, production, commercial, delivery and quality.

"We've developed a vendor rating system, which is starting to measure suppliers in terms of the accuracy and timeliness of providing management information," Shields says.

'ICI's rating under our vendor rating system is very high,' says Roger Da Forno.

"We have just procured an e-commerce, e-sourcing tool which will also have a vendor rating and a supplier management aspect, which we are going to integrate into the procurement and category management processes."

Seen more broadly JIT can include methods such as: product standardization and modularity, group technology, mixed model lines, lot size reduction, total productive maintenance, job enlargement, job enrichment, lean organization and vendor rating (JIT production is very sensitive to replenishment conditions).