We’re excited to continue our exploration of SRM trends based on our interview with State of Flux’s Alan Day. Alan and his team are currently gathering data for the next iteration of the annual survey, hoping to gather as much data from both buy-side and sell-side participants (companies can click the previous links to participate, get a copy of the results and benchmark their SRM capabilities). We encourage you to participate!
We recently had the chance to pose a number of questions about the state of SRM to Alan and the State of Flux team. In exploring the topic with them, we were especially curious about trends and changes year-over-year, as we’ve seen a large uptick in supplier management adoption and interest in recent quarters – and wanted to know if their data and observations suggest the same thing.
Supplier management has problems. Some might call them large problems. Whether you call it simply “supplier management,” supplier lifecycle management, supplier information management (SIM), supplier relationship management (SRM) or supply risk management doesn’t really matter. But what does matter is a relatively consistent set of challenges we observe that companies are having in building programs that can sustain themselves over time to go beyond a single (or handful) of highly specialized initiatives and programs.