The more I consider it, the more I appreciate the ways that good supplier management takes project management and moves it into overdrive. While project managers engage with groups that focus on solving specific business challenges, good supplier managers approach their work from a perspective whose outcomes benefit the entire organization. These benefits need to be embedded into contracts, SLAs, and dashboards.
Failure to adopt an organization-wide perspective can lead to situations whereby supplier management is fragmented, with multiple contracts sitting across the organization. Meanwhile your company loses out on the potential savings that can be gained from the centralized management of supplier contracts.
Supplier managers need to adopt a project management approach to their daily activities that involves:
- Risk Management to mitigate supplier risk by putting contractual requirements in place. This can involve engaging in supplier site visits to confirm compliance and ensuring that suppliers remain aligned with business strategy.
- Project Planning that needs to engage multiple skill contributors from across the business. These contributors help the supplier manager to review, renew, and sign off supplier contracts before they expire.
- Managing relationships with stakeholders across various levels of the organization (often in addition to the afore-mentioned contributors). They need to appreciate the financial impact of suppliers during their meeting with executives. They then need to help translate this bottom line into legal and technical terms that can be measured by delivery metrics. Then they must cross the hall and switch on their technical mindset when meeting with the database administrator. They use the executive’s requirements craft and define a weekly report that can condense into a dashboard that helps guide business decisions.
- When they engage with their greater procurement team, they need to communicate how they can contribute to managing the bottom line by identifying areas of cost extraction and savings, while ensuring that suppliers continue to deliver consistently across the business. In this way, their procurement head can justify the existence of a department that operates behind the scenes, quietly ensuring that business continues to operate while their effort is often unacknowledged in year end reports.
Once business start to understand and appreciate the project management approach to managing suppliers, they can be on the way to emulating what the MTN Group was able to achieve when they implemented their Lean Agile Procurement Framework (https://techafricanews.com/2025/07/30/mtn-group-partners-with-agility-arabia-to-drive-landmark-agile-procurement-transformation/) in 2023. The journey was not an easy one for MTN as they needed to engage in extensive training and redrafting of contracts to align them with their vision of centralized contractual ownership. However an RFP turnaround time that improved by more than 50% and billions of rands saved due to contractual negotiations highlights the positive impact of the transformation.
If Africa’s largest telecommunications provider can benefit from a project management approach to supplier management, surely your organization can also grow from adopting this perspective? As you revisit chapter 1 of “Managing IT Suppliers : A Practical Guide To Vendor Management (https://exclusivebooks.co.za/products/9781041104155)”, consider the leverage you can gain from cross-functional supplier engagement and contracting. Then work with your supplier manager to bring the newly-identified puzzle pieces together to create an improved outcome for your business.
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