I've spent 20 years working with enterprise procurement teams. Hundreds of conversations with CPOs and supply chain leaders about what makes supplier relationships work — and what makes them quietly fall apart.

Here's what I observed everywhere I went: enterprise CPOs manage hundreds of suppliers. Nobody can stay close to all of them. So by design, the only things that make it to a CPO's desk are the problems that have already escalated — the shipments that are critically late, the contracts that are about to blow up, the relationships that have already broken down.