How Business Relationship Management Maintains Quality Control

How Business Relationship Management Maintains Quality Control

Sean: When you’re looking for farmers or suppliers, what were the KPIs or metrics you were looking for in a supplier to maintain quality control?

Jason: For us, it is always relationship-based, are you in it for the long term? Is this the right partner that we should get? Because when you talk to farmers – first of all, they are already decades in terms of trading their fruits and vegetables. So when it comes to us, we’re a new entity that’s coming in and they will say “who is this new trader? We’re tired of them because most of the time they come and go away.” So we want to have a partner who will help us grow and would also like to grow together, in terms of how we will be able to tap into the market – just having that collaborative relationship. And so our KPI is actually basically helping each other, its give and take, it should not be ‘because you failed to deliver, it will be deducted to your scorecard.’ So we want to make sure we know what’s your pain point, you know, what’s our pain point and we work together on that.

Sean: Very nice. So more of relationship-driven rather than giving each other scorecards because you know for farmers it’s already tough for them.

Jason: Because they will also have the power to not give it to you – the products. They can say that ‘I would rather throw my products than give them to you.’ They really do have the power to do that. And it is really happening, you will see some trucks full of products and the farmers won’t sell them, they will just let them rot because the traders are trying to buy them at a very low price. And remember that these farmers also have pride, and they don’t want to sell at below cost, they’ll just throw it away rather than you profiting from it. So we always make sure we have the values that are already engraved.