If your supplier management strategy walks out the door when someone resigns, you don’t have a strategy.

If your supplier management strategy walks out the door when someone resigns, you don’t have a strategy.

You have (or had)… Janet.

And Janet is great.   Was.

Janet knew every supplier, every contract quirk, every negotiation nuance, and exactly which account manager is allergic to deadlines.

But when Janet leaves?

Suddenly the business is acting like a ship sailing through fog, just off the Bermuda Triangle, in rough seas, and the Captain has an eye infection.  “Pass the Optrex” isn’t going to work.

Because here’s what usually happens:

• Supplier history? Gone. In the blink of an (infected) eye.

• Why did we agree to that pricing model?  Gone. It makes no sense - why use Columbian RPI?  

• The reason we stopped using that supplier in 2018? Gone.  Although there might have been an incident at the Christmas party, or was that the fire in the basement?  Not sure.

• The undocumented handshake deal that’s been propping up a key relationship? Gone.   I think we might still have a phone number for the old Sales Director, though he works for the competition now, I think.

• The “don’t ever put them on a critical path” warning on a Post-it note stuck to Janet’s desktop? Also gone.  They never did fully understand Prince2. Thought it was a dodgy Royal. Or a symbol.

And then procurement is left piecing together supplier knowledge like air-crash investigators reconstructing a 737 Max from documents provided by AOG Technics.

Institutional knowledge loss is one of the biggest, quietest risks in supplier management.

Not because people shouldn’t move on - they should.

But because too many organisations rely on individuals to hold the entire supplier ecosystem together with memory, goodwill, and a colour‑coded spreadsheet.

When that person leaves, you don’t just lose information.

You lose:

• Negotiation context

• Relationship history

• Risk signals

• Performance trends

• The “unwritten rules” that keep things running

• And the ability to answer the question,  “Why on earth are we still using this supplier?”

The best teams don’t let supplier knowledge live in someone’s head.

They centralise it.

They structure it.

They make it accessible.

They make it survivable.

Procurement Says No is proudly sponsored by @Kodiak Hub, and our arrangement means we can say whatever we want about them, and they won’t get upset.

We like @Kodiak Hub because they’ve built a supplier management platform where your strategy doesn’t evaporate the moment someone hands in their notice.  We’re talking about you, Janet.

If your organisation is one resignation away from supplier chaos, take a look

Tell me…

Did you ever know Janet, and did you have to rebuild supplier knowledge from scratch after she left?