In this episode of AOP Introducing, Helen Mackenzie speaks with Sheldon Mydat, CEO and Founder of Suppeco, about the company’s SaaS platform designed to transform the customer-supplier relationship and drive value through enhanced accountability, collaboration, and transparency.
Measuring the effectiveness and quality of supplier relationships can be difficult and highly subjective. It is even more difficult to communicate the value and performance of those relationships to the business over time. Suppeco’s platform gives procurement a systematic and data-driven approach they can use to not only drive operational excellence across their supplier network but also demonstrate those gains to internal stakeholders. Suppeco goes beyond traditional supplier relationship management systems (SRMs) by helping procurement capture and measure the often-elusive value that resides in relationship management.
“Suppeco is a platform that focuses very much on driving operational excellence within customer-supplier relationships,” Sheldon explained. “We focus very heavily on the relationship, the operational relationship space.”
And, says Sheldon, Suppeco meets a core need that procurement has long struggled with, which is to generate and demonstrate value from successful relationships.
“We all know that the relationship space, as subjective as it has always been, houses a lot of value that hemorrhages out the door because of poor relationship-driven retention or data retention. That was always the case because we were very, very busy focusing on contracted value, on the numbers,” he said.
Suppeco differentiates itself by providing a unique framework to relationship management that’s defined by four pillars: relationship, commercial, projects, and service. This structure allows procurement to more effectively categorize and measure data that gives them targeted opportunities for value creation and growth and also enables them to better communicate this to company leadership.
“We’ve created this configurable relationship space. We’ve compartmentalized it,” Sheldon notes. “Once you can take that operational space and turn it into something manageable, you can then turn it into something measurable.”
Suppeco’s approach has proven valuable for clients like BAE Systems, who used the platform to become their suppliers’ customer of choice, said Sheldon. This led to benefits such as shared R&D and more open, collaborative relationships with suppliers. “They wanted to create a more collaborative experience for everybody in order to drive service,” he said.
Going beyond static data is key to successful relationship management, said Sheldon, and by offering real-time, actionable insights, Suppeco looks to be a positive disruptor in the SRM space: “Any digital platform that uses static data, I think they’re missing a bit of a trick, to be honest with you. It’s a gift. It’s like comparing digital with analog.”
