10 Cs of Supplier Evaluation
The 10 Cs score a potential supplier against ten factors from competency to cash to communication, so you catch the one that looks fine on paper but fails under pressure.
Each of ten criteria gets its own card, laid out for a quick pass-or-fail scan before you sign.
Reach for this when…
- You are choosing between suppliers and price is the only thing anyone is comparing.
- A supplier keeps under-delivering and you need to work out which part of the relationship is actually broken.
- You are about to depend on one supplier for something that matters.
How to run it
- List your candidate suppliers.
- Score each against the ten Cs: competency, capacity, commitment, control, cash, cost, consistency, culture, clean, communication.
- Weight the Cs by what actually matters for this contract.
- Flag any single C that's a dealbreaker regardless of the total score.
- Negotiate with the front runner, then monitor them against the same Cs after signing.
A worked example
Situation. Camila Vega runs Vega Textiles, a garment manufacturer in Quito, Ecuador, sourcing cotton fabric from three regional mills chosen mostly on price.
Applied. She scored each mill against the ten Cs and found her cheapest mill scored lowest on cash and control - thin working capital and no batch tracking, the exact combination that causes a mid-order collapse.
Result. She switched to the second-cheapest mill, whose consistency and communication scores were higher, and lost only a small margin while cutting late deliveries to near zero.
The catch
The Cs overlap - commitment and culture blur together - and scoring them is still a judgement call dressed up as a number. It works best as a shared conversation with the buying team, not a spreadsheet done alone. It also says nothing about single-source risk, which needs separate thinking.
A supplier can ace nine Cs and fail on cash, and that's the one that stops your production line.
Origin: Ray Carter