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Supplier Engagement

Improve supplier engagement, uncover innovation and collaboration opportunities and proactively manage performance and risk, with a 360° view of your strategic relationships

Supplier Engagement at a glance:

  • Move the dial from supplier management to supplier engagement with actionable insights on your strategic relationships
  • A single source of truth for all relevant data and insights – shared between you and your suppliers – that everyone can trust and rely on
  • 360° visibility of opportunities and challenges based on intelligence from your internal systems and stakeholders, external data sources, and supplier systems and surveys
  • Shared custom reports and dashboards to ensure both you and your strategic suppliers see measurable results from your improved relationship and collaboration
  • Purpose-built assets and scalable frameworks to accelerate delivery and unlock insights for a wide range of supplier engagement activities

Transform critical suppliers into strategic partners

Great procurement strategies are built on strong, mutually beneficial supplier relationships. When buyers and suppliers work towards agreed performance goals together – by sharing data, insights and ideas – risks decrease, innovation opportunities are uncovered, and costs can be optimised with ease.

The strongest relationships are built on transparency of information. But in many procurement organisations that information is either fragmented, biased towards one party, or missing altogether. And while SRM systems work well to track performance, they often lack flexibility to adapt to the unique needs of each strategic relationship.

To manage and capitalise on strategic supplier relationships, procurement and supplier management teams must:

  • Establish a robust data standard that ensures supplier information shared is unbiased and serves the partnerships – and all stakeholders within it – equally.

  • Manage and mitigate risks arising from increased market volatility and supply chain complexity.

  • Meet increasing internal and external stakeholder expectations with actionable insights.

  • Embed processes and procedures for identifying opportunities to improve engagement and drive value from supplier-enabled innovation.

We go beyond traditional supplier relationship management data…

The Smart Cube’s specialist teams combine internal and external data to create a single source of truth – shaped and defined by both buyers and suppliers – that can be used to deepen your most important relationships. With Supplier Engagement from The Smart Cube, you get data and insights across multiple modules:

  • Relationship Health Summary
    Relationship Health Summary

    Access insights into relationship highlights and lowlights (SWOT), opportunities to extract additional value and risk factors.

  • SLA Performance Analytics
    SLA Performance Analytics

    Including lead indicators on performance metrics, stakeholder satisfaction scores, peer comparisons and identified issues.

  • Financial Analysis
    Financial Analysis

    Financial health assessments through ratio and stock analysis, as well as external credit ratings.

  • Strategic Insights
    Strategic Insights

    Coverage of supplier developments (including new offerings, management changes and M&A activities), and key category developments (such as regulatory changes and peer activities).

  • Risk Monitoring
    Risk Monitoring

    Go beyond just financial risk indicators to cover operational, strategic, CSR and geographic factors.

  • Innovation and Collaboration Tracking
    Innovation and Collaboration Tracking

    Track and manage joint initiatives, including patent filings, category-level innovations and peer activities with a collaboration tracker.

How your business benefits

With Supplier Engagement from The Smart Cube, you can:

  • Spend less time collating data and more time working with strategic suppliers and internal stakeholders to deepen relationships.
  • Build mutual trust and use a single source of truth for all buyer and supplier data to create operational transparency.
  • Demonstrate the strategic value of procurement by providing regular supplier opportunity insights to internal stakeholders.
  • Maximise the value of your relationships by easily tracking progress of innovation initiatives.
  • Manage strategic supplier risk by tracking leading risk indicators to identify potential issues before they impact operations.
  • Track performance and value delivery more accurately and avoid the misunderstandings that can occur when inconsistent data is shared.

How we work with you

At The Smart Cube, we combine data visualisation and analytics expertise with a solid track record of delivering supplier intelligence to procurement teams in many of the world’s largest companies. Here’s how our process works:

Step 1

We understand your programme objectives and map out all relevant internal and supplier data sources through diagnostic and discovery workshops.

Step 2

We integrate your and your suppliers’ data sets, add relevant external data, and use custom and pre-built assets to create a solution proof of concept (POC) for a selection of strategic suppliers.

Step 3

We scale up and evolve the POC to cover other strategic suppliers, based on initial learnings.

Step 4

We create custom dashboards to deliver shared insights, accessible to you and your suppliers.

Step 5

We review and refine the solution to ensure it supports your shared objectives and is delivering clear value for all parties.

Why choose The Smart Cube?

When you choose The Smart Cube’s Supplier Engagement solution, you always get:

360° relationship views: We combine your internal data, supplier data and external market intelligence to create a comprehensive, insight-rich view of your strategic supplier relationships.


Data you and your suppliers can trust: Information in your bespoke Supplier Engagement portal is up to date, accurate and clearly referenced – ensuring it supports all stakeholders equally.


AI and HI in harmony: We blend Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence to deliver deep insights at speed. Unlike SRM software, our solution is bespoke, built around your unique supplier relationship needs.


Insights you can act on: We provide monthly snapshot reports highlighting areas of opportunity and concern, so you can work with suppliers to take the right actions in a timely manner.


Deep procurement and supplier expertise: When you work with The Smart Cube, you benefit from market, category and customer knowledge acquired through 17+ years of working in the procurement domain.


A flexible, agile and customised approach: Our specialists work as an extension of your team, tailoring solutions around you and your strategic suppliers – ensuring all stakeholders get everything they need from your shared data.


Supplier Engagement in action

Supplier Engagement solution helped drive supplier innovation

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client was struggling to get visibility on critical supplier performance and as a result was being reactive rather than proactive in managing supplier risk and therefore was exposed to significant supply risk.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube assessed supplier performance and created dashboards to provide a holistic view of 13 strategic suppliers that helped the client strengthen governance, manage supplier performance and drive continuous improvement/innovation.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The client gained better visibility into the performance and operations of 13 of its key strategic suppliers, representing £350 million of combined spend.

360⁰ view of strategic suppliers gave objective view across £854 million of spend

  • THE CHALLENGE

    The client wanted a holistic view of its key suppliers to enhance supplier performance management and improve its regulatory reporting capabilities.

  • OUR APPROACH

    The Smart Cube created supplier dashboards, giving a 360⁰ view of 9 strategic suppliers to strengthen governance, manage supplier performance and drive continuous improvement/innovation. The dashboards combined internal data from the client and external market intelligence to deliver valuable insights to support better decision-making.

  • VALUE DELIVERED

    The client gained comprehensive and objective visibility into the performance and operations of 9 key suppliers representing £854 million of combined spend (12% of its total spend).