ACTION FIGURE ARMS: WRAPPING UP THE 2025 SEPRIO SUMMER SERIES
You step out of your front door, stretched, warmed up, and ready for a run. You tap your watch to make sure it’s tracking your performance and settle into a brisk jog. But when you’re only a few blocks away from home, you stumble, trip, and fall. As you hit the ground, scraping your palms and knees as you catch yourself, you realize that the grueling months spent sculpting your upper body – the countless days at the gym doing push-ups and curls – haven’t trained you to use your legs or to run long distances. And, while we may aspire to have action figure-like arms, our goals require a more well-rounded plan at the gym.
The same mindset can be applied to your suppliers. Looking at the Seprio Wheel, you can see how the top half – from discovery to the final contract negotiation – can stand on its own. However, you can’t have a truly robust supplier system lifecycle without the bottom half. You can’t skip leg day. It’s A Marathon, Not a Sprint
Getting a contract negotiation finalized can often feel like a sprint to the finish line rather than a marathon but that’s only the first few steps of the supplier lifecycle. We need to plan for the long haul.
You may not see cardiovascular health staring back at you in the gym mirror the way you see flexing muscles, but that doesn’t mean you’re not contributing to longevity and increased health in your supplier interactions.
The goal of Seprio’s Sourcing best practices is to give our Clients increased visibility, consistency, cost savings, and risk reduction, but these are only possible in the long run with quality, integrated Supplier Governance. Aside from planning for renewals where we’re seeing significant increases where there are no increase caps, we’re seeing added functionality like AI that may not increase the cost, but definitely increases the risk. We’re also seeing increased risk as suppliers are hosting data in the Cloud for nearly every technology contract because the more suppliers with access to sensitive data, the more vulnerable the company is.
Supplier Governance helps you track and manage these risks. It also helps you determine whether a supplier relationship is and remains beneficial for your company. Suppliers’ sales teams exist to create a personal relationship with you and to minimize your objectivity. Seprio is your objective third-party. We can help you navigate through these challenges. We do this by following the bottom half of the wheel: managing the contracts, the risk, the performance, and the relationships.
Seprio’s Flex
Seprio is excited to fully roll out the bottom half of our wheel: The Supplier Governance Operating Model. Over this summer, we’ve released weekly articles outlining the risk that Supplier Governance combats and the importance of having a robust Supplier Governance Operating Model in your organization.
Throughout these articles, we’ve introduced Risk Management, Contract Management, Relationship Management, and Performance Management, all of which prioritize the longevity and health of your supplier relationships. The finalization of the contract isn’t the finish line, it is often the beginning. There’s continued and added risk, ongoing performance, additional contracts, and the full relationship to manage. We use a wheel for a reason – the best process is a full-circle that doesn’t stop at signature.
Just as a healthy person focuses on their entire body, companies should focus on more than getting the deal done, and for that you need Supplier Governance.
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