As emerging businesses grow and expand, additional opportunities to align and incorporate diversity into your company's supply chain are available. Integrating minority- and women-owned businesses is more than meeting a financial target or percentage for demographic supplier representation. Rather, the idea is that emerging businesses in underrepresented communities can add value to your company through the building of mutually beneficial relationships.

The principal goal of a supplier diversity program is to institutionalize opportunities for small and diverse companies to compete to become a part of your supply chain. This is done through increasing competition among suppliers along with procurement buy in to open and find new opportunities available for diverse suppliers.

Manual administrative tasks such as tracking and reporting are time consuming and take away from the important roles of building relationships with suppliers, increasing awareness and accountability and identifying new and existing opportunities for inclusion.

No matter the stage of your supplier diversity program, collaborating with an experienced supplier diversity partner can help streamline and automate processes so you spend less time on manual tasks and you can focus on developing and advancing your company’s supplier diversity stage.

In a 2015 survey of nearly 40 Global 1000 companies and their supplier diversity programs, The Hackett Group found that, while companies with world-class procurement organizations are generally more successful when it comes to diversifying their supplier spend, this doesn't necessarily mean their supplier diversity programs are successful.

Create, track and measure metrics that one, align with corporate and procurement objectives and two, are accurate. When defining or analyzing your metrics it’s important to think about; Are they effectively demonstrating the ROI of your supplier diversity program? Are they tied to other departments goals/KPIs? Are you able to measure them effectively and regularly? You can’t be successful if you can’t track and monitor your results accurately. How do you know if your supplier data is accurate, therefore how can you effectively baseline, benchmark and report?