What can you do when your supplier is bigger than you are? How do you get a 500-pound gorilla to cooperate with you? Can you actually use the term “manage” in relation to a big supplier company? Realistically, can you ever manage even small suppliers? Not really. You can try to manage and influence the relationship, but you can’t actually manage a supplier. Managing a supplier is a customer illusion. Customers and suppliers are part of the same value chain, but they remain independent entities, no matter how great or small you think your leverage over a supplier is. Once you stop thinking about managing suppliers, then new possibilities open up. Many companies believe that they can have no leverage over their larger suppliers, so they do not even attempt to get suppliers to make changes and improvements in the way that they do things that impact them, the customer. They focus on the smaller guys over whom they feel that they have financial clout. Or, in a supplier strategy session that I led, the team drew teardrops next to the names of some of their “big gorilla” strategic suppliers because they hadn’t yet figured out a way to get these companies to cooperate. They were suffering operationally and financially from the effects of low levels of cooperation, yet saw the potential benefits of alignment. Apparently, these large suppliers hadn’t seen the light yet.

I’d like to propose some ways to get larger suppliers to collaborate you and suggest how to make changes to the dynamics of the relationship. The first step in the process is identifying key or strategic suppliers with whom you’d like to develop a better relationship and collaborate in order to reduce cost and waste for your firm. If you determine that your relationship with the big supplier companies is purely transactional but should be strategic, then don’t give up in advance on ever getting the situation to change. It’s time to rethink your approach. You are creating potential risk and cost and forgoing the benefits. Yes, it is possible to dance with elephants and not get trampled. Stay tuned.