For many companies, If you asked 5 different people in the business to "show me this supplier", you would get:
5 different spreadsheets
5 different stories
and 5 different answers to "are they actually a good supplier?"
That is the reality in a lot of organisations. There is no central, shared view of suppliers across functions. Procurement, quality, supply chain, finance, ESG and local sites are all working from their own files and their own goals. The result is inconsistent information, inconsistent decisions, and a lot of frustration.
In your Gong calls this shows up as:
"We have no central platform."
"Everyone is working on their own goals with vendors."
"We want one portal and a single source of truth."
This blog takes that pain point head on and shows how Kodiak Hub helps you move from silos to a shared supplier truth.
Let's put some colour around the problem.
Procurement tracks contracts and prices in one place.
Quality tracks audits and non conformances somewhere else.
Operations tracks delivery performance in yet another system.
ESG and risk keep their own questionnaires and assessments.
If you ask "How is Supplier X doing?" the answer depends entirely on who you ask and which file they open.
Because there is no shared view:
Some suppliers are "favourites" for one plant or region, even if their performance is mediocre overall.
Other suppliers quietly perform brilliantly but remain unknown outside one business unit.
You cannot easily see where you are double paying, double qualifying or double negotiating with the same group.
Preferred vendor decisions end up based on scattered local knowledge, not data.
With information distributed across functions:
There is no common vendor rating or simple way to say "these are our top partners" vs "these are fine" vs "these are risky".
Stakeholders create their own informal rating systems and workarounds.
When you want to design a category strategy, you spend weeks just collecting inputs before you can decide anything.
You feel like you are running procurement with your eyes half closed.
Without a shared supplier portal:
People email each other asking for the "latest" certificate, audit report or QBR deck.
It is unclear who owns which supplier across functions.
Meetings spend 30 minutes aligning on facts instead of 30 minutes making decisions.
And yes, it makes implementing anything like AI or advanced analytics way harder, because there is no consistent data layer to build on.
Moving to one shared view is not just "nice for housekeeping". It unlocks a few critical things.
If everyone sees the same supplier map, vendor ratings and performance history:
Preferred supplier lists are built on data, not anecdotes.
Category strategies and sourcing decisions are easier to justify.
You can explain to stakeholders why you are consolidating, diversifying or shifting share.
You move from opinion driven to evidence driven.
Regulation and customer expectations around supply chain due diligence keep rising. Without a central view you have:
compliance blind spots
duplicated or missed assessments
gaps in documentation across functions
With a shared platform you can see:
which suppliers have valid evidence
which are missing critical documents
how risk signals look per supplier and per category
That makes it much easier to prove you are in control.
Supplier Relationship Management only really works when:
everyone sees the same facts about a supplier
QBRs are grounded in shared data
improvement plans and development work are visible across teams
A single supplier view is the precondition for serious SRM.
Any hope of using AI to support supplier selection, risk, negotiation or innovation depends on:
structured, fairly complete supplier data
shared definitions and rating scales
one place to pull from
Without that, AI will simply multiply the confusion.
Most teams you talk to already know what they want. It sounds like this:
"We want one portal and a single source of truth for supplier information and documents, so everyone has the same understanding of each vendor."
Concretely, that means:
One place where:
each supplier has a profile
documents, certificates, audits and QBRs live
performance, risk and ESG data are visible
internal and supplier users collaborate
Procurement, quality, supply chain, finance, ESG and local plants log into the same platform and see the same supplier record.
You can see:
which suppliers are used in which plants, regions and categories
how much you spend with each group, across entities
where multiple local suppliers actually belong to the same parent
This helps you spot consolidation opportunities, risk concentrations and relationship gaps.
Suppliers are rated using:
standard scorecards and KPIs (delivery, quality, cost, service, risk, ESG)
consistent scales and weightings
clear thresholds for "preferred", "approved", "conditional", "phase out"
Everyone understands why a supplier is rated as good, average or problematic.
The platform supports:
category manager views for strategy
quality and audit views for compliance and technical performance
ESG views for due diligence and reporting
executive dashboards for top suppliers and risks
Same data, tailored lenses.
This is where Kodiak Hub aligns almost perfectly with what buyers describe in Gong calls.
Kodiak Hub is designed as a central supplier hub:
a single profile for each supplier and site
structured fields for identity, category, region, ownership, contacts
linked documents, certificates, audits, performance scores and contracts
Procurement, quality, supply chain, finance and ESG teams all work from the same truth.
With Kodiak Hub you get:
a shared workspace where internal teams collaborate on supplier evaluations, audits, scorecards and QBRs
a supplier portal where vendors upload documents, answer questionnaires and see their performance feedback
No more endless internal email threads and no more suppliers asking who to send what to.
Kodiak Hub helps you:
map suppliers across business units, regions and categories
visualise where spend is concentrated and where there are overlaps
segment suppliers by criticality, risk, strategic importance and performance
You can quickly answer questions like:
"Who are our strategic suppliers in this category globally?"
"Which suppliers are single sourced in multiple plants?"
"Where are we overly dependent on one group?"
Kodiak Hub lets you define:
standard scorecards for suppliers, with KPIs like OTIF, PPM, cost variation, audit scores and ESG indicators
weighting schemes and rating scales that make sense for your business
thresholds for preferred suppliers and minimum performance expectations
The result is a vendor rating model that is:
transparent
shared across functions
directly tied to real data
It becomes much easier to say "these are our A suppliers" and back it up.
Kodiak Hub provides:
overview dashboards for procurement leadership
operational views for category managers and plant buyers
quality and audit views for technical teams
tailored reports for ESG, risk and compliance teams
Everyone gets their own My View, but the underlying data is one and the same.
You do not need to wait for a perfect data model or multi year transformation. A simple approach:
Pick a meaningful slice of your supplier base: for example, top 100 suppliers by spend or risk.
Load them into Kodiak Hub with core information: identity, sites, categories, regions, owners.
Add key documents and performance indicators that matter most today.
Invite stakeholders from procurement, quality, supply chain and ESG into the platform.
Run one or two QBR cycles and a renewal cycle using the shared view.
Refine your vendor rating model based on these learnings, then extend to more suppliers and categories.
Once people experience the difference between "everyone has their own spreadsheet" and "everyone can see the same supplier truth", they do not want to go back.
If your current reality is "no central platform" and people working to their own goals with vendors, that is not a failure on your part - it is a natural outcome of growing complexity without the right tools.
Kodiak Hub is built to give you the one portal, single source of truth, supplier mapping and vendor rating that your teams keep describing. With it, you can turn a shared aspiration - "we want a central, common view of our suppliers" - into something concrete you use every day.