Companies of all types have been affected by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, but many of the operational challenges they’ve faced over the past 18 months were magnified by the pandemic, not caused by it. Those problems reflect a longstanding and fundamental shortcoming in how companies’ relationships with their product and component suppliers are structured.

Currently, no clear standards exist to determine what supply chain risks are acceptable and what risks are not acceptable. According to Farida Ali, in such a manufacturing environment, relationships that define and formally align the interests of the purchaser and the supplier need to be developed as she describes in a new article recently published in the Harvard Business Review. She therefore shares some lessons learned about how to establish such a relationship.