Where Traditional SRM Fell Short

For years, SRM sat in the shadow of procurement’s old doctrine: control the spend, manage the risk, keep suppliers at arm’s length. Kraljic pushed the field forward, but it also left a legacy of defensive thinking – categories, leverage, and the quiet assumption that suppliers must be contained, not developed. That approach held up when the world was stable. It isn’t stable anymore.

Suppeco’s philosophy starts with a simple admission: modern supply chains don’t break because a spreadsheet said the wrong thing. They break because relationships are weak, information is fragmented, and nobody sees the operational truth early enough. Resilience isn’t built in contracts; it’s built in the way people work together on Tuesday afternoons when something slips.

The Operational Truth We’ve Ignored

We don’t romanticise suppliers. We don’t demonise them either. The point is that value today comes from cooperation – real cooperation, not the “strategic partner” wallpaper that’s been printed on slide decks for two decades. Cooperation shows up in the operational noise: missed signals, early warnings, informal fixes, the small adjustments teams make without fanfare. That’s where the real SRM story lives.

Traditional SRM barely touches any of this. It relies on quarterly meetings, end-of-month reports, and KPIs that describe history, not reality. Suppeco’s stance is blunt: if 90% of your data is operational and unstructured, then 90% of what matters is happening outside your line of sight. You can’t govern what you can’t see.

So the philosophy is this: treat the relationship as an active system. Make the operational data visible. Pay attention to behaviour, not just metrics. When you expose how the relationship actually functions – not how the contract says it should – people align around truth rather than politics. The relationship becomes a working asset, not an obligation.

Co-Resilience: The Only Strategy Left

Co-resilience is a big part of this. No organisation is resilient on its own anymore. You’re only as steady as the weakest link in the ecosystem you depend on. But if customer and supplier are both working from the same live, shared operational narrative, that link strengthens fast. Problems show earlier. Fixes happen sooner. Trust isn’t a slogan; it’s a measurable pattern.

Suppeco’s philosophy is not anti-procurement. It’s anti-blindness. It replaces the old zero-sum reflex – “protect our side” – with something far more practical: “see the real relationship, fix what moves, and grow what works.” That’s modern SRM. That’s the point.