Rich Sains

The Procurement Conversation Podcast Host | Elevating Procurement | Procurement Leader | 10x Procurement |

My focus is on transforming IT and procurement functions for top enterprises, leveraging over a decade of consulting experience to deliver real, impactful change. The Procurement Conversation podcast, which I host, furthers this mission by sharing insights with a global audience, fostering a community where expertise and trends in procurement are at the forefront.

Our team's approach priorities strategic activities and benchmarks success, ensuring our impact resonates across the businesses we serve. Through Acada's software and advisory services, including transformation and process re-engineering, we are elevating the procurement function to new heights, creating value for stakeholders and suppliers alike.

Founder

We help procurement leaders to solve many of the challenges they face in today's complex environment and manage their teams more effectively and objectively.

Sheldon Mydat

Suppeco is an award winning transformational SaaS platform, delivering a paradigm shift in B2B attitude.

Trusted by market leaders, Suppeco is the next generation of collaborative relationship platform. Enabling organisations in any industry to drive an infinite array of targeted opportunity for value creation and growth. 

Transparency.
Actionable visibility.
Frictionless access.
Supplier performance excellence. 
Adaptability and resilience.   
Social audit compliance.
Innovation & growth. 

Visit our page and say hello. Click to follow, stay connected for news, regular updates, new releases, concessions and advice. 

Experienced Procurement Leader.
Tech Founder & Innovator. 
Collaborative Supplier Relationships (a.k.a SRM) Procurement & Commercial Professional. 

Engaging with clients to promote best in class customer-supplier relationships.

Transition Modelling analysis and negotiation for outsource, M&A, divestment, and exit. 

Functional governance modelling, operational risk assurance,
Binding collaboration and incentive,
Core innovation - vision road-maps & frameworks.

Clients include:
public-sector, logistics, financial services, communications, defence, SI consultancy, and some of today’s most recognised names.

Specialities: 

Suppeco Collaborative Relationships
Supplier Management Optimisation
Transition Modelling for Outsource & Divestment

Founder and CEO

Hatchet Job or Life Line - AI on Procurement. 

Automation is already stripping out large parts of the job - analytics, reporting, process, compliance. That’s a done-deal. Procurement doesn’t get a say. The lower ground has gone. Or at least it now has a shelf life. And procurement 5 is pushing commoditisation. So it’s not just enterprise. Tech is more accessible now than ever. This is an adapt or die scenario. 

The only ground left is where AI can’t operate: judgment, ethics, complex negotiation, relationships, and real business leadership.

Ironically, this is where procurement has a serious problem.

Too many people in the profession don’t know how to work with other humans. They hide behind process, default to binary thinking, confuse rudeness with strength, and call it being “commercial”. It isn’t. It’s unprofessional.

Ghosting suppliers. Stonewalling stakeholders. Avoiding hard conversations. This behaviour is rampant - and it’s exactly why procurement has carried a bad reputation for years.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: as automation removes low-value work, procurement becomes less analytical and far more relationship-led. That demands business acumen, emotional intelligence, and ethical judgment. Many people simply don’t have those skills and have shown no interest in developing them.

If you’re scrambling up the value ladder looking for safer ground, ask yourself honestly:

▪️Can you negotiate properly?
▪️Can you influence without authority?
▪️Can you build trust and still deliver outcomes?

If not, AI isn’t your threat: relevance is.

Procurement has a narrow window to become a serious business function. If it doesn’t, it won’t be transformed.

It will quietly die - and this time, there is no pandemic. 

Full read in SRM Today https://lnkd.in/e-mFKNYR

CEO at Suppeco (IDC Named Innovator) Revolutionising SRM | Procurement and Supply Chain Leader | Supplier Relationship Evangelist & Speaker.

Six years ago, we started something with BAE Systems Digital Intelligence that went well beyond “supplier management”.

The ambition was simple, but bold:
Move from arms-length, spreadsheet-driven oversight to genuinely collaborative, transparent, value-creating relationships.

What followed was a shift:

▪️From KPI hindsight to real-time, shared operational truth
▪️From contract compliance to relationship performance
▪️From one-sided governance to mutual visibility, trust and accountability
▪️From cost control to innovation, resilience and joint value creation

As Simon King Head of Supplier Operations put it at the time, Suppeco helped “bring structure and visibility to aspects of supplier relationships that were previously intangible” – and, crucially, gave suppliers an equal voice in the conversation.

Six years on, that early collaboration still represents what SRM should really be about:

▪️Not systems.
▪️Not dashboards.
▪️Not process theatre.

But behaviour, trust, reciprocity, and the willingness to work in the open.

Proud of the partnership. Proud of the outcomes. And grateful to the BAE Systems Digital Intelligence team for being true pioneers of collaborative #SRM.

Couldn’t resist! Dave Jones MCIPS  

#Procuary is around the corner and Suppeco man is on the case supporting the Procuary security guards.

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📢 The word STRATEGIC is often used as cover for charging lots of money.
❓ Who agrees or has experience of this??

Suppeco is democratising and dare I say commoditising accessibility.

◾ Pushing back against user based licencing. 

◾ Pushing back against hidden licence restrictions and cost.

◾ Pushing back against functionality cost traps.

◾ Pushing back on enterprise only playbooks.

Simplicity over Complexity. The Big Leveller. 
Pop over to Suppeco and Say Hi 👋

Suppeco Social Aspirations

📢 If your CPO, or CEO asked... 

⁉️ “I’m due to meet with the CEO of our strategic suppliers - A, B, and C, let me have supplier briefs”.

🫵 how fast could you answer? In fact let's just start with 1 supplier. 

🔎 Without a digital supplier account plan, you'd probably spend days reaching out to several individuals to pull that information together. 

A supplier account plan on Suppeco brings it all together:

🔵 One place. Full context. Real visibility.

🔵 Not just for procurement - for the business.

See for yourself. Pop over to Suppeco say hi! take a tour!

Digital Supplier Account Plans 

What’s the common link?

▪️SaaS fails on adoption, not functionality.

▪️Transformation fails on change, not strategy or tooling.

▪️SRM fails on relationships, not contracts or KPIs.

In each case, the limiting factor isn’t tech or process, it’s human behaviour: trust, incentives, habits, power dynamics, and willingness to embrace change.

Take REAL SRM. You’re not digitising a workflow; you’re intervening in a live, emotional system between people in organisations. Software can expose signals, create structure, and reduce friction - but it can’t force collaboration. It can only enable it where people are prepared to meet it halfway.

Which is why most “SRM platforms” traditionally defaulted to scorecards and dashboards. It was always easier than dealing with people!

Ironically, change has catapulted SRM to prominence in 2026

▪️SRM tops recruitment priority focus surveys.
▪️SRM tops procurement focus for driving resilience.
▪️SRM tech in 2026 is a major growth area. 

Today’s biggest value opportunity sits in unstructured data. That’s operational, not systemic. Suppeco leads in turning that operational layer into value.

The common link is people. Always has been. Always will be. You can buy better software, mandate better process, and publish better KPIs. But unless behaviour changes, outcomes won’t. SRM isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a behavioural opportunity.

SupplyChain - An Overhead!??

Previously, vendor management and supply chain were viewed as costs. If a subject didn't contain the word "customer", it was deemed an overhead. What do we do with overheads? Reduce them.  

That outdated over simplistic view has a lot to answer for. Today, supplier data is one of the most valuable commodities. Businesses run on supplier data.  
   
The reality is: most of that data lives in operations. It’s messy, unstructured, semi-structured, scattered across systems, and deeply contextual. And that’s exactly where the value lives. It needs to be extracted.  

At Suppeco, SuppEQ AI doesn’t wait around for sanitised, curated datasets that never arrive. It works at scale in the murky world of unstructured, often “dirty” operational data - extracting intelligence, context, and foresight that clean data advocates simply never reach.

Come say Hi 👋 Take a closer look! 

🔗 https://www.suppeco.com

#Suppeco #SupplierData #SRM #AI

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