Supply chain is a network designed for organized buying, selling, paying for and delivering goods and services between businesses. Depending on the size and type of organization you work for, you may encounter various forms of supply chain. These may include a supply chain manager responsible for signing long term national contracts with vendors for such things as uniforms. It may be just you going out there to find suppliers for your operation yourself. Whatever the supply chain mechanism is, there are a few key items to know one, national contracts may or may not be better than local contracts. If you have a national contract with a company that provides uniforms, your company may be getting these uniforms to you at a really good bulk base deal.

However, if you're in a remote location, where the national contractor does not have an established presence, you may be experiencing delays in delivery, poor quality of product or invoicing issues to local contracts have their ups and downs as well. A local contractor may cease operations abruptly failed to honor the terms of the contract such as delivery, timeliness, or carry or items at higher prices. There is also a problem that if on a national scale, your companies engage with local contractors only. This will involve more administration on your company's part, specifically on the accounting and the supply chain folks, as well as the inability to negotiate for better bulk deals. Three, your company needs to establish qualifications for contractors to have in order to be able to provide product and service to it. Such qualifications may include the position of relevant licenses, insurance, a certain number of years in business and demonstrated experience in providing services to a company with a similar business to yours.

You're taking a lot of risk when employing a contractor and you want to make sure the risk is managed as best as possible.