Lets get married or shall we just fool around?

Thinking a lot about supplier relationship management today, of course there's an acronym available and someone has sketched down a few lines on wikipedia, anything else would be a chock. But still from personal experience I must say that this is a somewhat forgotten issue.

Looking through traditional "consultancy" products and what the major players are doing there has always been a lot of focus on supply chain management... but that's not what I'm angling for. SCM is more about the logistics, the contracts and so forth…

I’m more concerned about what implications a business development project has on the suppliers, on how we not only should enable innovation at the “supplier-side” but also encourage and stimulate it, how moving towards Lean or agile will affect they way we cooperate with external partners etc.