Here it goes one of my favourite:

Definition of a good supplier
According to Wilbur England (1974)
“A good supplier is one who is at all times honest
and fair in his dealing with the customers, his own employees, and himself; who has adequate plant facilities, and know-how so as to be able to provide materials which meet the purchaser’s specifications, in the quantities required, and at the time promised;
whose financial position is sound; whose prices are reasonable both to the
buyer and to himself; whose management policies are progressive; who is alert to the need for continued improvement in both his products and his
manufacturing processes; and who realizes that, in the last analysis, his own
interests are best served when he best serves his customers”.
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The QuEST Forum define "good" with measurements. They wrote TL 9000 based on ISO 9001 in order to better manage the telecom supply chain, and it defines standard measurements which are reported to a central database. The metrics are customer-facing, and enable purchasers to identify "good" suppliers, and competing suppliers to know what "good" is in terms of average and best performance across the industry. They measure:

-on-time delivery (per contract, so good contract review is rewarded)
-number of problem reports per month - correlates with product quality across the massive range of products and services used in the telecom industry
-fix response time (ok, it's gonna break, we know that, fix it--fast)
-system outage (phone companies really, really hate it when the network stops)
-return rates
-service quality (e.g. percentage of installations performed that are accepted by the customer on time)

They divide products and services up into about 100 product categories and you report against your product category, enabling comparisons of like with like. Not all categories report all the measurements, for example, services like "install cable in the road" _do_ report service quality but not return rates. There are a few other measures as well, like software quality, but the right way to measure that is being debated right now, and the current measures aren't very useful IMHO: on-time delivery and problem reports are excellent measures of software quality.

The definitions are formal, and the processes for collecting, analysing and reporting metrics must be audited as part of the certification and surveillance audit process. Statistical checks are run on measurements reported into the database to further cross-check for errors and, um, deliberate manipulation. So there's a high degree of confidence they're accurate.

Companies that do TL 9000 well maintain long-term relationships with their suppliers and define "good" as something like, "Delivers on time, with low and improving defect rates; fixes problems fast and response time is improving; listens to us carefully and designs innovative fresh products we can introduce to the networks with confidence. And buys us nice lunches!"

More info at www.questforum.org or you can contact me, of course. To see the data you must be a member of Q Forum. It's a global organisation, some say the largest quality organisation in the world in terms of combined revenues of member companies. Membership costs $10k a year and is open to telecom sector companies only.

Hope this helps,
Patrick