SKU naming + vendor scorecard — printable templates for buyers and ops.
Two printable templates — a consistent SKU naming convention you can roll out across your catalog, and a vendor scorecard your buyers can fill in monthly to spot supplier drift early.
The short answer
A SKU naming convention encodes stable attributes in a fixed order — category, product, variant, size — and never encodes anything that can change, such as price, season, supplier, or storage location. A vendor scorecard tracks four measures monthly per supplier: on-time delivery rate, fill rate, lead-time variance, and defect rate.
Worked example
A workable pattern is CAT-PROD-VAR-SIZE, for example TEA-EARL-ORG-100G for organic Earl Grey in a 100g pack. Category and product stay fixed for the product's life, variant and size distinguish sellable units. What must stay out is the supplier code: change suppliers and every SKU would have to be renamed, breaking every historical sales record tied to the old code.
Why encoding the supplier into a SKU always hurts later
It is a tempting shortcut because it makes purchasing easier to read at a glance. The problem arrives the first time you dual-source or switch suppliers: the physical product is unchanged, but the identifier has to change, so sales history splits across two SKUs and every demand calculation built on that history quietly breaks.
The same argument rules out season, price tier, and warehouse location. A SKU is an identity, not a description. Anything that can change about the product belongs in a field, where it can be updated without rewriting the past.
Four vendor measures that catch drift before it costs you
On-time delivery and fill rate are the obvious pair — did it arrive when promised, and was it complete. Lead-time variance is the one most often missed and often matters more: a supplier averaging 12 days but ranging from 8 to 20 forces you to carry buffer stock for the worst case, which is real money even when the average looks fine.
Defect rate closes the loop, because units that arrive on time and in full but cannot be sold are not really received. Scored monthly, these four turn a vague sense that a supplier has got worse into a number you can put in front of them.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a good SKU naming convention?
Fixed-length segments in a fixed order, encoding only attributes that never change — category, product, variant, size. Keep it readable, keep it consistent, and never encode price, season, supplier, or location, because all four change and would force a rename.
Should the SKU include the supplier code?
No. If you dual-source or switch suppliers, the product is identical but the SKU would have to change, splitting the sales history that every demand and reorder calculation depends on. Track the supplier as a field against the SKU instead.
What should a vendor scorecard measure?
On-time delivery rate, fill rate, lead-time variance, and defect rate, scored monthly. Lead-time variance is the one that most directly drives your safety stock, because you must buffer against the worst case rather than the average.