Suppiler Agreement Management

The CMMI handbook says:

The purpose of Supplier Agreement Management (SAM) is to manage the acquisition of products and services from suppliers.

I think finally we’ve arrived at a topic that is of little relevance to small companies. Not because they don’t buy stuff from suppliers, but because the volume will often be low enough that it can be dealt with without a formal process.

The notable exception may be if you buy items to directly or indirectly sell them on to customers, at a larger scale. But at that point what you are doing stops being engineering, and starts being trading. And that has its own customs and rules.

So in the interest of brevity we’ll leave it at that.