Supplier RAM

01 / Risk visibility

Knowing that a supplier’s score changed wasn’t enough. People needed to understand why.

TechnipFMC depended on a large network of third-party suppliers. Supplier Quality focused on quality and safety expectations, investigation, and facility audits. Category Management managed the strategic and commercial relationships. Both groups needed a shared understanding of supplier performance and risk.

Risk assessment relied heavily on an Excel-based model. Each month, quality or safety events contributed to supplier scoring. A poor or deteriorating score could lead to investigation, cross-functional discussion, or a supplier-site audit.

Knowing that a supplier’s score changed was like knowing your credit score dropped without seeing the factors that caused it.

The issue was not that Excel looked bad. The story behind the score was fragmented across spreadsheets, files, reports, shared storage, and manually distributed information.

02 / Shared understanding

Connect the signal to the events that produced it.

A data-science team revisited and improved the underlying risk model. Instead of rebuilding and distributing an Excel report each month, the model could run through the application’s backend process and publish updated information into the product.

The interface connected supplier → score → contributing events → historical context. Supplier Quality could explain what changed, what contributed to the score, and what needed attention without manually reconstructing the story from disconnected files.

03 / My role

From discovery through working software.

I worked across interviews, discovery and framing workshops, synthesis, stories and journeys, feature definition, wireframes, high-fidelity product design, validation, iteration, React UI implementation, launch, and a later revision.

The breadth mattered because the product sat between product management, development, data science, Supplier Quality, and Category Management. I helped translate those different perspectives into one coherent workflow.

04 / Taking the workflow into the field

The audit was not separate from the risk story. It was the next chapter.

Supplier Quality Engineers sometimes visited supplier facilities to investigate and perform audits. The existing workflow combined paper forms, handwritten notes, separate cameras or phones, later transcription, and manually assembled reporting. That duplicated work and fragmented the audit record.

A later mobile experience let engineers work through audit questions, record findings, capture photographs or video where appropriate, submit the audit, make appropriate amendments, and expose the results through the broader Supplier RAM platform.

Risk signal → investigation → field audit → evidence → report → shared supplier history

The system also managed audit-form versions because the questionnaire changed over time. Preserving which form governed a completed audit was a small but important enterprise-product requirement.

05 / Strategic reflection

Digitizing a workflow and transforming a workflow are not the same thing.

Supplier RAM successfully centralized a fragmented workflow and made it usable as software. In retrospect, we mostly produced a strong digital implementation of the existing process.

The larger opportunity was predictive intervention: using historical and operational data to identify suppliers trending toward trouble before the situation became severe enough to trigger reactive action. Stakeholders were not necessarily ready to change the process that radically.

Reactive risk management → predictive intervention

That distinction now shapes how I evaluate product opportunities. Putting a spreadsheet in a browser can be valuable. The more important question is what becomes possible once the workflow is software.