Blog

Companies have been investing in customer experience for years. Now, competition is also shifting toward securing the best suppliers: this is why Supplier Experience must be defined, measured, and managed as a strategic asset.

Andrea Tinti, CEO and Founder of IUNGO

In recent years, Customer Experience has become central to corporate strategies. Organizations invest resources, technology, and skills to make the customer journey increasingly simple and fast, because in competitive markets, the quality of the experience matters just as much as the quality of the product.

There is, however, another experience within the supply chain that almost no company measures: that of its own suppliers.

What is Supplier Experience?

Supplier Experience is the set of interactions, processes, and tools through which a supplier works with a client company: from qualification to request for quotation, from purchase order to delivery, through to invoicing and payment. In a single sentence, it indicates how easy it is for a supplier to work with us.

It depends on three elements: clarity of communication, fluidity of processes, and transparency of shared information. It is the procurement-side counterpart to what Customer Experience represents on the sales side.

Why Does Supplier Experience Impact Business Results?

Because the quality of collaboration with suppliers directly determines the speed, quality, and efficiency of the entire supply chain. A supply chain moves only as fast as its slowest link, and that link is often an information exchange between client and supplier.

Delayed order confirmations, duplicated data, repeated follow-ups: these are costs that do not appear under any line item in the budget, but are paid for in longer lead times, higher safety stocks, and hours of procurement team labor spent chasing information instead of creating value.

What Has Changed in the Relationship Between Companies and Suppliers?

The balance has shifted: today, it is no longer just companies choosing suppliers, but also the best suppliers choosing their clients.

For a long time, the relationship was asymmetric. Companies selected partners, set the rules, and expected suppliers to adapt to their procedures and tools. The model worked because supply was abundant and suppliers were easily replaceable.

Today, supply chains are more fragile, markets are more unpredictable, and the ability to innovate depends on the ecosystem surrounding the company. Many suppliers provide specialized expertise, production capacity, and technological knowledge that are difficult to replicate. At the same time, the growing focus on sustainability and traceability requires them to share more and more data.

The result is that the best suppliers behave like the best customers: they choose who to work with and, all else being equal, favor those who make collaboration simpler.

How Does a Poor Supplier Experience Manifest Day to Day?

It manifests through fragmentation: too many channels, too many tools, too many repetitive requests.

A supplier working with dozens of clients receives orders via email, follow-ups by phone, and often must use a different portal for each client, each with its own credentials, formats, and procedures. For the client company, each step is a standard internal procedure; for the supplier, it defines the overall collaborative experience.

Here lies a paradox: many tools created to digitalize the supplier relationship have actually worsened the experience. Every new portal is a cost that the client offloads onto the supplier: training, passwords, and time spent re-entering data that already exists in their own systems. The result is low adoption rates and processes that effectively revert to email and phone calls.

When the experience is complex, the consequences extend well beyond administrative efficiency: lost time, errors, misunderstandings, and, over the long term, a reduced willingness from the supplier to invest in the relationship. Conversely, when processes are clear and information is accessible, response times decrease, data quality improves, and the supply chain reacts better to unforeseen events. It is not about making suppliers happier; it is about getting the entire supply chain to work in sync.

How Do You Measure Supplier Experience?

It can be measured using a few operational indicators, many of which companies already possess in their systems but do not analyze through this lens.

Five are enough to start:

Average order confirmation time. How long it takes a supplier to confirm, modify, or reject an order. It is the first sign of friction in the process.

RFQ response rate. How many invited suppliers actually respond to a Request for Quotation. Low participation often indicates a process perceived as overly burdensome.

Adoption rate of structured channels. The share of suppliers, and of spend, interacting through structured digital channels rather than via email and phone.

Effort required from the supplier. The number of systems, steps, and data re-entries needed to complete an order-to-payment cycle, which can also be tracked through a short recurring survey.

Visibility into invoices and payments. How easily the supplier can check the status of invoices and payments, and how often they need to follow up on them.

None of these indicators tells the whole story on its own. Together, they offer a concrete snapshot of how easy a company is to work with as a client.

How is the Role of Procurement Changing?

Procurement is shifting from a function focused on control to one that facilitates collaboration across the supplier ecosystem.

More advanced companies have realized that value increasingly originates within the network of relationships connecting customers, suppliers, and partners. Control, compliance, and governance remain essential, but on their own they are no longer enough: building resilient supply chains requires sharing information effectively, minimizing operational friction, and getting everyone to work toward the same goals using the same data.

In this sense, Supplier Experience becomes an explicit responsibility of procurement—with dedicated goals and KPIs—just as Customer Experience is for marketing and sales.

What Role Does Digitalization Play?

Digitalization improves Supplier Experience only if it simplifies work for the supplier, not just for the client company.

For this reason, when selecting tools, the crucial question is: does it demand that the supplier adapt, or does it adapt to the supplier? Is it capable of engaging even the smallest and least structured suppliers, who are often the most critical? When information is accessible, up to date, and shared in real time, dialogue is streamlined and the relationship can focus on value creation. A technology that the supplier does not use digitalizes nothing: it merely moves the problem elsewhere.

The Question Companies Must Ask Themselves

For decades, companies have asked themselves how to improve the experience of their customers. Now is the time to ask the same question about suppliers and answer it with data.

Over the coming decade, companies will not only compete for customers, talent, and market share: they will also compete for the best suppliers. Those capable of offering simpler, more transparent, and more effective collaboration will start with a competitive advantage that is currently overlooked, but already measurable.