For most retailers, the answer is no. The gap between enforcement and expectation is costing them shelf performance they cannot get back.
There is a document sitting somewhere on your company's website, probably in a supplier portal or attached to an onboarding email, that shapes how every supplier who works with you understands their job. It defines what they ship, how they label it, when they send an ASN, what happens if they're late.
That document is your vendor guide. And in most cases, it is doing far less work than you think it is.
SPS Commerce recently assessed 36 publicly available vendor guides across retail, grocery, wholesale, and distribution. Every guide was scored against a consistent framework, not for length, not for design, but for one question: does this document give suppliers what they need to execute?
The results are worth sitting with.
Key Findings at a Glance
6.9 / 3.2 enforcement vs. performance management mean scores | 56% of guides score Functional or below | 6 of 36 guides reach Strong tier (75+ out of 100) |
Enforcement Infrastructure. Not Performance Infrastructure.
Across all 36 guides and all four verticals, the average enforcement score, covering chargebacks, compliance deductions, and penalty schedules, sits at 6.9 out of 10. Retailers have invested heavily here. The consequence architecture is clear, well-documented, and applied consistently.
The average performance management score, covering published KPIs, OTIF targets, fill rate thresholds, and ASN accuracy expectations, sits at 3.2 out of 10.
The Central Finding
That 3.7-point gap held across every vertical, every company size, and every document format in the study. It is not an anomaly. It is a structural pattern. Most suppliers who work with you know exactly what bad costs them. They do not know what target they are being measured against before the chargeback arrives.
56% of Vendor Guides Score Functional or Below
The maturity distribution skews toward inadequacy. Six guides score Broken, below 40 out of 100, lacking the basic infrastructure to drive reliable supplier execution. Thirteen score Weak. Only six reach Strong, at 75 or above.
The guides that reach Strong share a set of specific, repeatable characteristics. They define performance thresholds, not just penalties. They carry version numbers, named owners, and stated review cadences. That sounds administrative, but it matters enormously: a vendor guide with no governance signals is a static PDF that becomes less accurate every month it goes unupdated. Thirteen of 36 guides in this study have governance scores of four or below.
Strong guides also do something most guides do not. They treat the supplier as an operator who needs to succeed, not just a vendor who needs to comply. They include onboarding sequences, escalation paths, and dispute windows with defined SLAs. They answer the questions suppliers are actually asking.
What Every Strong-Tier Guide Has That Broken-Tier Guides Lack:
Published KPI targets with calculation methodology
Governance with teeth: version number, named owner, review cadence
Enforcement tied to measured thresholds, not discretionary judgment
A defined supplier onboarding sequence
Named exception pathways with dispute windows and resolution SLAs
What Suppliers Are Actually Asking
This study cross-referenced vendor guide scores with conversation data from MAX, the SPS Commerce intelligence layer built on the trading partner network. The pattern that emerged is direct.
Suppliers are asking an AI whether they are compliant because their vendor guide never told them what the target was. They are asking what carton requirements apply to their specific order type because the guide does not distinguish. They are asking about dispute windows for invoice rejections because no pathway is defined.
From the MAX Conversation Data
Every one of those questions represents a vendor guide failure and an operational cost. The time spent on both sides of those conversations, the exceptions generated, the chargebacks issued for violations that a clearer document would have prevented. The execution gap is not just measurable in document scores. It shows up in every unanswered question suppliers bring to MAX.
The Enforcement Paradox
One of the more counterintuitive findings: among the 36 guides assessed, the dimension with the highest average score is enforcement. The dimension with the lowest is performance management.
That asymmetry has consequences beyond friction. Retailers with high enforcement scores and low performance management scores are telling their suppliers, in effect: we will penalize you for missing a standard we have not published. That is not a compliance program. It is a liability structure.
The retailers whose vendor guides score Strong show a different profile, not just in their documents, but in the operational and commercial outcomes that track alongside them.
Where Your Guide Sits
The research covers four verticals: retail (mean score 61.0), grocery (59.2), wholesale and distribution (59.0), and drug and convenience (49.0). The within-vertical range is wider than the between-vertical range in every case. The best guide and the worst guide in the same vertical are separated by as much as 58 points.
That spread is not explained by company size or document length. It is explained by organizational investment decisions, specifically the decision to invest in the dimensions that determine whether a vendor guide actually drives supplier execution: governance, performance management, and supplier enablement.
The path to Strong Tier is available to every vertical. Most have not taken it.
Read the Full Execution Gap Research Report
The full report covers how all 36 guides scored across eight dimensions, what separates the six Strong-Tier guides from the six Broken-Tier guides, how supplier behavior in the field maps to document quality, and what the commercial trajectories of retailers at each maturity level look like.
Log in or create a free SPS Community account to access the full report.
Once you've read the report, you can also request a benchmark of your own vendor guide against the Strong tier profile to see where you stand relative to your vertical peers.
Research methodology: SPS Commerce assessed 36 publicly available vendor guides, routing guides, and supplier compliance manuals across four verticals using a consistent 100-point framework. Private companies are identified by revenue band and vertical descriptor. Public companies are named. Every score required direct textual evidence from the document. Scores reflect the document as assessed, not the broader compliance program it may be part of.
