Supply-Chain Success in ’26 Calls For ‘Intimacy’ and a Little of the Old-Fashioned Way
Key Highlights
- Supply chain leaders have a chance to shift from short-term firefighting to long-term strategic planning that emphasizes resilience and innovation.
- Collaboration and transparency with suppliers are crucial, moving beyond transactional relationships to build trust and shared goals.
- Viewing suppliers as part of the organization can lead to more flexible, risk-spreading strategies that improve overall stability.
After half a decade of battling one fire after another, supply chain leaders enter 2026 with a chance to build some stability into their work.
Doing so successfully will mean executive teams truly taking on the lessons of the pandemic, the inflation crunch that followed and the tariff turmoil that (hopefully) peaked last spring and summer. On those journeys, flexibility, strategic integration and trust are in. Gatekeeping and looking to exploit leverage are out.
“There’s a lot more intimacy now with these relationships,” Joseph Esteves, CEO of consulting firm Maine Pointe, said on a recent EndeavorB2B webinar. “You want to reward your suppliers for resilience and innovation, not just price. That’s a big conversation that’s happening more and more.”
Such conversations are becoming more frequent because the upheavals of recent years have often left manufacturers, suppliers and their logistics partners with similar and simultaneous blind spots and needing to fighting short-term fires rather than investing in long-term upgrades. Charles Clevenger, a principal at UHY Consulting, said one of his major themes for 2026 is the need to better forecast demand and understand customer requirements — hence the need for the added intimacy Esteves mentioned.
Webinar: Where We've Been and How to Navigate Where We're Going
EndeavorB2B last month hosted a wide-ranging conversation about how suppliers and logistics companies are handling tariffs and other pressures and how they can turn their supply chains into a competitive weapon. You can register for the webinar, which featured Rick Blasgen of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, Mary Ruth Williamson of Sourcing IQ and Joseph Esteves of Maine Pointe, right here.
Technology, including artificial intelligence applications that can more quickly sift through mountains of data, is playing a key role in the search for added stability. But Clevenger notes that old-school tools are still very effective: A supplier client of his last year addressed uncertainty with a customer not combing through planning software or reorganizing spreadsheets. Instead, he simply phoned the general manager of the plant he serviced and asked for a detailed production schedule on which to base operations in the coming weeks.
“AI is helping,” Clevenger said of improving visibility. “But the old-fashioned way still works, too.”
That’s if the old-fashioned way doesn’t also include shielding data and plans from suppliers and operating on a stingy “need-to-know” basis. Mary Ruth Williamson, the founder and CEO of SourcingIQ, said on Endeavor’s webcast that companies need to spend more time truly collaborating with their suppliers. Now is the time to push forward on the work done during and after the pandemic rather than revert to previous ways.
“A lot of procurement departments are well known for gatekeeping information,” Williamson said. “Skill sets have to change […] to share data that is important to share. Transactional relationships are in the past completely.”
That message seems to be hitting home at large organizations: Product identification software vendor Loftware recently asked more than 400 leaders at a global group of companies with at least $1 billion in sales how they’re adapting to the volatility in today’s supply chains. At a high level, the Loftware team wrote, “companies are responding by accelerating investment in solutions that unify supplier ecosystems, ensure consistent and compliant product data, and reduce the operational friction caused by siloed processes.”
Esteves said he’s seeing those initiatives among his clients. Where many firms used to organize a few joint planning sessions, he noted, many now want more integration and a coordinated approach to handling tariffs and various other risk scenarios as well as how suppliers are doing similar things with their own vendors.
“What we’re seeing on the ground is deeper supplier collaboration for resilience and innovation,” Esteves said.
This isn’t buzzword bingo, either. Simply put, being a reliable partner — whether as a supplier or the final seller — will be rewarded with market-share gains from buyers who are likely wrestling with their own supply chain uncertainties. And UHY’s Clevenger said stronger supply chain operations should, in the end, be all about better managing and spreading risk: A good way for leaders to add flexibility and a buffer to their supply chain operations, he said, is to ask themselves how they might manage risk differently if a set of suppliers were a division of their company.
“You’d frequently do things differently,” Clevenger said, adding that the thought exercise should then lead leaders to change up some things, better spread their risks and add to their peace of mind. “There are plenty of things to negotiate. This shouldn’t be one of them.”
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Contributor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde joined EndeavorB2B in September 2021 to cover public companies, markets, and economic trends primarily for IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal, T&D World, and Healthcare Innovation. His work focuses on strategy, leadership, capital spending, and mergers and acquisitions, and he also works with Endeavor Business Intelligence on surveys and data projects.
Geert has been in business journalism since the mid-1990s. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati, initially covering retail and the courts before shifting to banking, insurance, and investing. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal before being named editor of the Nashville Post in 2008. He led a team that helped grow the Post's online traffic by an average of more than 15% annually before joining Endeavor.
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