Benefits, criteria and activities of supplier development: a categorical literature review

Purpose – Supplier development (SD) is a kind of collaboration among a buyer and a supplier to seek constant improvement in supplier performance and capabilities to provide better quality, on-time delivery of products and services at lower cost. The purpose of this paper is to exhibit and summarize the important aspects of SD benefits, SD criteria and SD activities. Design/methodology/approach – The review of SD aspects is based on 72 papers published from 1991 to till date in academic databases namely Science Direct, Emerald, Springer-Link Journals and IEEE Xplore with “supplier development” and “vendor development” as keywords. Findings – Through the literature review, this paper brings up the analysis of aforementioned aspect of SD in detail and put forth 43 SD benefits, 23 SD criteria and 9 SD activities. This paper also presents the important SD benefits, SD criteria and SD activities based on the occurrence in literature. Research limitations/implications – The literature on practical difficulties for implementation of SD activities, and trade-off between benefits and risk associated with SD activities are seldom available. Originality/value – This paper presents a literature review on three crucial aspects namely SD benefits, SD criteria and SD activities. The SD benefits, SD criteria and SD activities are identified according to their level of importance. The main contribution of this paper is to draw together three above mentioned important aspects of SD.