You recognize that the world of work is changing, and you want to better understand it.
You have little or no knowledge and experience in leading supplier diversity initiatives and want to pick up the fundamentals.
You may be uneasy about supplier diversity and curious about how it can help your organization.
You want to develop into a more effective and impactful supplier diversity leader.
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout this book, you find icons that help you navigate the information. Here’s a rundown of what they mean:
Beyond the Book
This book contains lots of ideas, strategies, checklists, tools, resources, references, best practices, and other sources that give you more than enough to work with. But there’s more! It includes an online Cheat Sheet that provides guidance and tips for spotting and dealing with common supplier diversity barriers, a list of questions to determine your organizational readiness, and ways to gain internal and external stakeholder support. To access this handy Cheat Sheet, go to www.dummies.com and type Supplier Diversity For Dummies Cheat Sheet in the search box.
Additionally, if you, your team, or members of your organization need supplier diversity training, coaching, a keynote speaker, or consulting on any of the processes I share in this book, or want to obtain a certificate in supplier diversity, you can access information and a number of free resources at www.sdti.co.
Where to Go from Here
Like supplier diversity, this book isn’t linear. Feel free to use the table of contents as a guide to move around to get exactly what you need. Part 1 gets you off to a great start and sets the foundation for really understanding supplier diversity. Part 2 looks at your internal environment. Part 3 discusses your suppliers and developing a program that’s supplier-centric. Part 4 examines the external environment and your community. Part 5 talks about technology and analytics and the role they play in today’s supplier diversity programs. Part 6 looks at how to build or expand a career in supplier diversity.
This book isn’t designed to be an exhaustive or definitive work on supplier diversity. And I don’t expect you to become an expert on all things supplier diversity in order to become an effective practitioner. Supplier diversity is a process and a journey, and you won’t get to the Billion Dollar Roundtable overnight. Hopefully, though, you’ll be able to sharpen your skills and apply what you read here so that you can help your organization and the diverse businesses you work with. Focus on being that champion that everyone wants to support because they believe in the mission behind supplier diversity and the value it brings to the organization and the community.
Part 1
Getting Started with Supplier Diversity
IN THIS PART …
Examine the growing demand for supplier diversity.
Discover the basis and history of supplier diversity.
Explain supplier diversity management (SDM).
Recognize the differences between supplier diversity and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Understand the supplier diversity structure within your organization.
Chapter 1
Understanding the Growing Demand for Supplier Diversity
IN THIS CHAPTER
Supplier diversity is a proactive business strategy that encourages buying from businesses that identify as belonging to a specific socioeconomic, historically disadvantaged, or underutilized demographic as suppliers, vendors, and contractors. The Small Business Administration, commonly called the SBA, classifies businesses in a number of categories. The most common are minority-owned or disadvantaged, women-owned, veteran-owned, and service-disabled-veteran owned. Corporations have expanded their definitions to also include LGBTQ to be more reflective of their local communities.
Supplier diversity has continued to progress from legislation to stabilize social unrest during the late 1960s to an economic imperative and a bona-fide management strategy. Supplier diversity programs recognize that when an organization buys products and services from suppliers that have been historically underutilized, it helps nurture and transform its own supply chain. Supplier diversity also gives organizations access to agile businesses with timely business solutions that allow them to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
In this chapter, I cover what supplier diversity is (and isn’t) and why it’s still needed. I also identify some of the factors
