Usually no. On a shared supplier platform, suppliers should not automatically see each other’s KPI performance.
In most industrial and regulated environments, KPI access is intentionally segmented by supplier, site, program, customer, or role. A supplier commonly sees its own scorecard, open issues, corrective actions, delivery metrics, quality trends, and any documents or workflows that apply to its scope. Cross-supplier visibility, if allowed at all, is typically limited to anonymized benchmarking or tightly controlled consortium-style arrangements.
Platform configuration: Role-based access, tenant isolation, report design, and data model choices decide what each supplier can see.
Data governance: KPI definitions, ownership, approval rules, and publication controls matter. A shared dashboard can expose more than intended if governance is weak.
Contractual and commercial sensitivity: On-time delivery, quality rates, escapes, and responsiveness are often treated as confidential supplier performance data.
Regulatory and security constraints: Export-controlled, defense-related, or customer-restricted programs may further limit who can see program-specific metrics or technical context tied to those metrics.
Integration design: If KPIs are aggregated from ERP, MES, QMS, or portal data, poor mapping or weak identity controls can create accidental overexposure.
A practical pattern is:
Supplier A sees Supplier A’s KPIs and actions.
The buying organization sees all suppliers.
Internal category managers or quality teams see rollups across suppliers.
Suppliers may see benchmark bands, quartiles, or anonymized comparisons, but not named competitor results.
That approach balances performance management with confidentiality and reduces commercial friction.
There is a tradeoff between transparency and control. Broader visibility can encourage competition and improvement, but it can also create confidentiality concerns, disputes about metric fairness, and unnecessary exposure of program-specific problems. In regulated settings, it also raises questions about traceability of data sources, approval of KPI logic, and change control when formulas or source systems change.
Another practical issue is that supplier KPIs are often not fully comparable. Different part families, routing complexity, inspection intensity, customer requirements, and concession rules can distort apparent performance. Publishing cross-supplier comparisons without context can drive the wrong behavior.
In brownfield environments, shared platforms often sit on top of mixed ERP, MES, PLM, QMS, and supplier portal stacks. That means visibility rules are only as good as the underlying identity management, master data quality, and integration mappings. Full replacement of legacy systems is rarely the right answer just to solve supplier visibility, especially where validation burden, downtime risk, qualification constraints, and long asset lifecycles make rip-and-replace strategies expensive and fragile. In practice, controlled coexistence with strong access design is usually safer.
If you need suppliers to see comparative KPI information, define the exact audience, level of aggregation, anonymization method, approval workflow, and auditability before enabling it. Otherwise, the default should be supplier-specific visibility only.
Whether you're managing 1 site or 100, Connect 981 adapts to your environment and scales with your needs—without the complexity of traditional systems.
Whether you're managing 1 site or 100, C-981 adapts to your environment and scales with your needs—without the complexity of traditional systems.
