The best-laid plans often go awry. This can be true in both life and business, especially when global supply chains are involved.

Supply chain disruptions have become the new normal, which is why I advocate for building collaborative relationships across an organization’s departments involved in integrated business planning. For companies wanting to create plans that stick and develop resilient supply chains, it’s just as essential to foster collaborative and transparent relationships with all the suppliers in their supply chain ecosystem.

However, the road to facilitating greater collaboration between supply chain suppliers is littered with obstacles, including:

• Lack of supplier onboarding to company processes and disconnected technologies hindering optimal data sharing, leading to supply chain delays.

• Lack of incentivization for cultivating strong supplier relationships and their impact on the business.

• Lack of trust and hesitation to share information with suppliers and vendors. This hesitation can be valid for both sides, especially if a supplier serves competitors or if multiple suppliers compete to provide products.

Creating stronger multi-tier supplier collaboration and maintaining supplier relationship management (SRM) is crucial for today’s business leaders. While technology platforms can aid in information sharing, developing trust to openly share information relies on getting to know your suppliers.

Here are three considerations:

1. Include suppliers in your business planning processes

Collaborative planning processes are a necessary component to ensure company-wide alignment on critical business objectives and goals, but it’s also key to consider expanding such collaborative efforts to include your multi-tier suppliers.

By involving suppliers in integrated business planning and sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes, teams can share information such as market insights and relevant supply investments. This allows for a co-developed strategy.

Including suppliers in the planning process creates greater visibility, which allows your organization to gain a better understanding of their broader market perspective. Suppliers, in turn, then gain insights through your company’s closer connections to the end customer.

For example, Toyota Motor North America focuses on building organizational efficiencies that lead to a better customer experience by developing greater visibility with suppliers to improve demand forecasts and proactively address demand and supply issues.

2. Set expectations during a supplier’s onboarding

Establishing a collaborative relationship with a supplier begins with setting the tone from the start. Creating an operational framework for mutual information and data sharing encourages collaborative interaction. The onboarding framework should cover each organization’s processes for ordering goods, producing products, quality control and regulatory requirements to determine the best ways of working together.

Additional factors for fostering collaboration include establishing best practices for communication, defining resource allocation, involving suppliers in the blueprinting process and aligning initiatives that are jointly beneficial. Keeping the process simple is crucial because complex processes hinder collaboration. The technology facilitating information sharing must be seamless, allowing easy connection of various technologies and enabling collaboration. The processes and technologies should make it easy for teams to focus on exceptions while letting automation drive most information sharing.

3. Technology is key to building collaborative ways of working

A significant SRM challenge is ensuring that upstream suppliers, with whom companies may not have regular contact, can fulfill demand for necessary components or materials. For example, a cobalt shortage affecting a tier-three or tier-four supplier for lithium batteries could reduce the number of components delivered to downstream customers. Without multi-tier visibility and collaboration, companies might not learn about such shortages in time to respond proactively.

To build more flexibility in collaborating with multi-tier suppliers, companies can use planning platforms with advanced AI and analytics capabilities. These next-generation platforms can model the multi-tier supply chain network, configuring algorithms, workflows, interfaces and reporting capabilities to unify collaboration efforts. This ensures that all stakeholders work with shared information and make better decisions.

Overall, multi-tier collaboration can have a transformative impact on a company’s supply chain. Not only does this build trust and a greater willingness to share information between your organization and suppliers, but it also plays a critical role in gaining end-to-end visibility across the supply chain. While technology and processes are significant factors in facilitating supplier collaboration, it’s just as important to focus on building an overall company-wide culture of collaboration. This ensures that collaborative processes don’t just look good on paper, but are effectively implemented across all aspects of the business and its supply chain ecosystem.