ProcureTech Insider
Where does the supplier management scope actually end?
It doesn’t. That is the honest answer. The supplier management scope has kept moving outward for years. The people inside it rarely got a say in the moves.
Jesse Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Brooklyn Solutions, was asked exactly this on the Art of Procurement ProcureTech Insider podcast with Jyothi Hartley. His answer starts with an irony worth naming.
Jesse Lee on the Art of Procurement ProcureTech Insider podcast with Jyothi Hartley.
Why Doesn’t Automation Shrink the Workload?
Because the time it frees rarely stays freed. It gets spent on new scope. That is the pattern Jesse Lee describes, and most supplier management teams will recognise it immediately.
The business case for digitising supplier work is usually written as a time dividend. Automate the chasing, the spreadsheet reconciliation, the evidence gathering. Release the team to do higher-value work. Sometimes that is exactly what happens.
Often something else happens. The capacity appears, and the organisation notices it. New responsibilities arrive to fill it. The team ends up, in Jesse Lee’s phrase, tactically doing more.
This is not an argument against automating. It is an argument for being honest about where the savings go. A dividend nobody protects gets reinvested by default.
The last two or three years
“Your job is supplier management. Now your job is also onboarding.”
Jesse Lee’s summary of how the boundary actually moves. Nobody redraws it in a strategy document. It arrives as one more thing, and then another.
The published write-up of the same conversation puts the current position plainly: supplier management now spans onboarding, risk, compliance, performance and governance simultaneously and those functions sit across disconnected systems, teams and departments.
The Boundary Shift Nobody Announced
The most significant move is not onboarding. It is a change in what the team is expected to know. Jesse Lee describes the request as it actually arrives:
“We don’t know if we want to bring that supplier in, but we’re interested in what we do. We’re running an RFX. We’re going to choose one probably. So you know about what all our suppliers have and do, even the things we don’t buy off them. You tell us, right?”
Read that carefully. The expectation is no longer a record of what you buy. It is a record of what your suppliers are capable of, whether you buy it or not.
That is a different data model, not a bigger one.
| Contract-bounded record | Capability-bounded record | |
|---|---|---|
| What is in scope | What we have bought and agreed | What the supplier can do, including what we have never bought |
| Where the data comes from | Contracts, invoices, performance against agreed terms | Supplier-supplied capability data, kept current by the supplier |
| Question it answers | Are they delivering what they promised? | Should this go to market at all, or can someone we already trust do it? |
The second question is far more valuable to the business. It is also the one supplier management teams are least resourced to answer, because nothing in a contract repository was built to hold it.
Who Actually Decides the Boundary?
Not the org chart. The questions people bring you. If you are the person who knows the suppliers, you inherit every question about suppliers. Sourcing decisions, risk reviews, audit requests, and the RFX nobody has run yet.
That is worth stating without complaint, because it also describes the function’s leverage. Jesse Lee frames procurement’s purpose as accelerating the business roadmap, and notes it “often has to earn its seat at the decision-making table”. Being the team that can answer the capability question is one way that seat gets earned.
The problem is not the questions arriving. It is arriving at them without the record to answer from.
Even Regulators are Struggling to Draw this Line
The boundary problem is not confined to procurement teams. Look at how the rules themselves have moved — in both directions, within about a year.
Outward, in UK public procurement. The Procurement Act 2023’s Central Digital Platform launched on 24 February 2025. Suppliers submit core business information centrally — company details, recent accounts, connected persons, exclusion grounds — which “can then be shared across multiple bids and customers”. Supplier information became a standing dataset rather than a per-tender exercise.
Inward, in EU due diligence. On 24 February 2026 the Council signed off simplification of the corporate sustainability due diligence rules. Where impacts are equally likely or severe across several areas, a company “is given the ability to prioritise assessing adverse impacts which involve direct business partners”. Companies work from “reasonably available information”, which the Council notes “will reduce the trickle-down effect of information requests on smaller business partners”.
That second one deserves attention. Legislators looked at unbounded value-chain scope, weighed the cost of the information requests it generated, and pulled the line back to direct partners. The boundary question is genuinely hard, and the answer moves.
If the Work Arrives Anyway, Does the Boundary Matter?
Yes, for one practical reason. Scope you have not named is scope you cannot resource. Unnamed work still gets done, but it gets done out of slack — and slack is the same thing resilience runs on.
Naming the boundary does not mean defending a fixed one. It means writing down the supplier management scope you own today. Then each addition is a visible decision rather than an absorption. Onboarding joining supplier management is a reasonable design. Onboarding joining it unacknowledged is how teams end up quietly underwater.
A moving boundary is workable. An invisible one is not.
What Makes an Expanding Scope Survivable?
Making each addition cheaper than the last. If you cannot refuse the scope, that is the only lever left. Two things determine whether you have it.
First, whether the data is shared rather than owned. Jesse Lee’s position on this is unambiguous: “Data available to multiple people pays dividends… we think the different functions should be well connected to each other, and it has to be easy. It can’t become more homework for anyone.” When onboarding arrives as a new responsibility, it costs far less if the supplier record, the contract and the risk position already sit together.
Second, whether governance travels with the work. That is the argument in digitally embedded policy — expectations expressed once and landing automatically on new suppliers, contracts and services, rather than needing a person to apply them each time.
Practically, this is why Brooklyn treats supplier relationship management, contract lifecycle management and third-party risk management as one connected discipline across the full source-to-outcome journey, rather than as separate tools to bolt together later. The guide to supplier relationship management covers the wider picture, and operational resilience is what the slack ultimately protects.
Hear the Full Conversation
Jesse Lee and Jyothi Hartley cover supplier management as a connected discipline on the Art of Procurement ProcureTech Insider podcast — where the scope now reaches, why operational resilience sits at its core, and what to look for in a solution.
