Do You Trust Me? How to build supply chain supplier relationships

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2019 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2019

A few days ago, a colleague sent me “The Death of Supply Chain Management,” an article in the Harvard Business Review. If the title wasn’t enough to grab my attention, the last sentence in the first paragraph had me checking out job openings on LinkedIn: “Within five years to 10 years, the supply chain function may be obsolete, replaced by a smoothly running, selfregulating utility that ….. requires very little human attention.” Read more carefully, what the authors are really arguing is that as NextGen technologies find their place in our organizations, the role of the supply chain manager, including procurement managers, is going to…

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Trust is the health food of the business world. Because numbers play such a huge role in business decisions, the value of trust in business relationships can be underestimated if not overlooked. How many times have you heard someone say: “It’s just a business decision” and asked yourself if they know what they’re throwing away? The fact is: Trust is essential to every business relationship and often sways decisions beyond the numbers.

Nowhere is that more evident than in supplier-buyer relationships. How an industrial customer engages with its suppliers is often the difference between receiving game-changing preferential treatment and watching from the sidelines as others prosper. Clearly, trust relates to and enables these successful business relationships. The irony is that something seemingly as intangible as trust affects so many variables that are quite tangible. It’s never “just business” when it comes to the buyer-supplier relationship.

Clearly, becoming the customer of choice and receiving preferential treatment from suppliers is something that is earned rather than given. But how does that happen? A survey of almost 250 suppliers shows what trust looks like and how to build it.

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