“Collaboration” makes for a nice slide. Clean. Polished. Easy to nod along to in a boardroom.
But the real thing? It’s raw. It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable as hell.
Real collaboration happens in the hard moments — when someone on the floor speaks up, even if it’s not what the boss wants to hear. When a team admits what’s broken, not just what looks good on a report.
And when that doesn’t happen?
Things fall apart. Not because your process is weak. But because your people stopped talking.
Most supply chains don’t implode from a bad forecast or a missed delivery. They fail in silence. Because no one felt safe enough to say, “This isn’t working.”
That’s not a system issue. That’s a trust collapse. And if you don’t fix that, nothing else will hold.
When “Defects” Are Actually Design Flaws
Let me give you an example.
When I was at Lockheed Martin, we had a supplier in Germany shipping us parts for satellite payloads. Every single shipment came in with a defect. Not once in a while—every time. And every time, we’d write them up. Formal documentation, corrective action requests, review cycles. It dragged on for years. Frustration mounted on both sides. But no one ever stopped to ask why the same issue kept happening.
Then a new supply chain manager came in and took a different approach. Instead of playing paperwork ping-pong, he flew our team to Germany and ran a four-day Kaizen event. Engineers sat with engineers. Manufacturing sat with manufacturing. People who actually do the work talked to each other.
Within two days, we found the problem.
The drawing for the part included default dimensions for a wire harness—something the supplier was dutifully trying to produce to a specific length with tight tolerances. But that dimension wasn’t properly defined. Why? Because the first thing we did when the part arrived was cut the wire harness to a much shorter dimension. That spec? Totally irrelevant to the finished product. The supplier was being written up, again and again, for “defects” that had zero impact on quality or performance
We changed the drawing. The write-ups disappeared. Just like that.
That’s what collaboration looks like. Not just fixing the part—but fixing the thinking behind it.
Real Collaboration Starts at the Contract
It’s not a weekly meeting. It’s not a shared Google doc. It’s getting in the virtual or physical same room, looking each other in the eye, and solving the right problem together.
But that only happens if you’ve built the trust to get there.
And trust doesn’t start when you start delivering. It starts at the contract.
You want suppliers to share risks with you? Then your terms better support that. If your contract says, “Any savings you generate, we keep,” don’t expect anyone to bring new ideas to the table. But if you say, “We’ll split it 50/50, and we’ll support the changes you need to make it happen”—you’ve got a partner, not just a vendor.
I’ve seen this work in aerospace, in defense, in general aviation, and in complex capital equipment. I’ve also seen it fail—usually when someone decides to chase the lowest bidder and forgets the cost of failure.
Partner or Vendor: You Choose
Another example: we outsourced harness production to a new supplier. But before we handed anything off, we didn’t just make a site visit or run a quick training. We embedded their team in our facility for weeks. Not hours. Not days. Weeks. Their technicians built side by side with ours. Our engineers worked directly with theirs. We shared tools, knowledge, and trust.
The result? A smooth transition with zero disruption—and better processes than we started with.
A similar company took a different route. Picked a cheap supplier who didn’t understand the space requirements. Ignored input from their own team. Six months later, they were desperate for support to rework unusable harnesses. That’s not just bad strategy—it’s leadership malpractice.
If you want to rethink collaboration, start here:
- Get engineers talking to engineers. Not just managers to managers.
- Build contracts that reward innovation, not silence.
- Assume your procedures aren’t perfect—because they’re not.
- And most importantly, lead with transparency. If your supplier’s scared to tell you the truth, you’re already behind.
Done right, collaboration is a competitive advantage. Done wrong, it’s an illusion—one that falls apart the moment pressure shows up.
The question isn’t whether you have a supply chain.
The question is whether you have a partner.
