A kitchen can have a superb fishmonger and still run out of fish on a Saturday night. I learned that as a chef long before I studied buyers for a living. The fishmonger was financially sound, delivered great product and never once missed an invoice. The problem sat elsewhere: one boat, one road, one driver. When any of the three failed, the supplier was fine and my dining room was not.

Procurement is now discovering the same lesson at scale. ProcureAbility’s 2026 CPO Benchmark Study, published on 9 September 2026 and based on 160 senior procurement leaders at large enterprises across 21 industries, describes what it calls a shift in procurement’s risk focus from supplier health to supply continuity. Read that sentence twice. For years we asked whether the supplier is a sound business. Increasingly we are asking whether the thing we need will actually arrive.

The numbers behind that shift are worth sitting with. In the same study, 62% of respondents cite geopolitical disruption as a primary risk and 55% cite logistics disruption. Yet only 6% say they have predictive or real-time monitoring tools, while 62% still rely on manual or periodic risk assessment. So buyers worry about continuity more than anything, and most of them check on it the way a chef checks a walk-in fridge: by opening the door now and then and hoping.

Why this is a relationship question, not only a tooling question

When I interviewed buyers for my research, continuity came up again and again, often before price did. The sentence behind it was rarely “we want the cheapest supplier” and far more often “I never want to explain to my board why the line stopped”. Business continuity is the buyer’s quiet top priority, and it shapes how they judge every supplier interaction, whether or not they say so.

Here is the part that interests me most. The early warning signs of a continuity problem usually sit with the supplier long before they sit in any dashboard. A second-tier component maker is struggling. A port is congested. A key engineer has left. The supplier often knows first. Whether the buyer hears about it depends on something no monitoring tool can buy: the quality of the relationship.

That is where balance enters. If a supplier expects to be punished for bad news, bad news arrives late. If a buyer never explains which parts of the supply are truly critical, the supplier cannot prioritise them. Both sides are guessing, and the guessing happens in the space where continuity is won or lost.

Three habits that build continuity before the crisis

Say what “critical” means. Most buyers have a mental list of the three or four things that would stop the business. Few suppliers have ever seen that list. Share it. A supplier who knows that one item out of forty matters enormously will treat it differently on a bad week. This is mise en place for a relationship: everything in its place before service starts.

Make bad news cheap. Ask suppliers, in a regular conversation and not only in a quarterly review, what worries them about the next ninety days. Then respond to the answer with help, not a penalty clause. A supplier who is thanked for an early warning will send the next one earlier.

Swap the snapshot for a rhythm. A yearly risk assessment is a photograph of a river. Continuity moves. Even without expensive tooling, a light monthly check-in on the handful of critical suppliers gives you more signal than a thick annual questionnaire. Technology can then amplify that rhythm, but it should follow a logic you have already agreed on.

The balance point

There is a temptation, when risk headlines pile up, to tighten control: more audits, more clauses, more reporting demands. Some of that is sensible. Yet a supplier buried in compliance requests has less attention left for your actual supply, and the relationship becomes a paperwork exercise that produces reassuring documents and thin resilience.

The alternative is equilibrium. The buyer is clear about what matters and generous with context. The supplier is honest about risk and early with news. Neither side wins at the other’s expense, because the outcome both want, goods arriving on time, is shared.

I explore this buyer-side perspective, including what buyers told me they wish their suppliers understood, in my book The Buyer’s Balance: What your customers want to share with you (Owl Press, 2025, ISBN 9789464778908). More at evaluationshub.com/book.

So here is my question for this week. If your most critical supplier had a problem today, how many days would pass before you heard about it, and from whom?

Source: ProcureAbility, 2026 CPO Benchmark Study, press release of 9 September 2026 (160 senior procurement leaders, 21 industries).