The Problem
“She and I have built this R&D submission log. Every material that we’re sourcing goes on it. All of the information is manually added in.”
An R&D director at a co-manufacturer described their sourcing documentation system. One person — the “technical document individual” — maintains a master log of every ingredient, every supplier, every qualification status, every cert. Manually. In a spreadsheet that is, by every measure, the most important document at the company.
It’s comprehensive. It’s organized. It’s entirely dependent on one person.
The institutional knowledge problem
In mid-market CPG, the most valuable supply chain data doesn’t live in a system. It lives in people’s heads — and in the personal spreadsheets, email folders, and contact lists they’ve built over years.
A sourcing lead at a snack brand described it exactly: “Between the three of us, we all have our little black book and knowing where to go for certain ingredients.” Three people. Three private Rolodexes. Three separate maps of the supplier landscape. If any one of them leaves, a chunk of institutional knowledge walks out the door.
This isn’t carelessness. It’s rational behavior in the absence of infrastructure. When there’s no shared system, people build their own. Those personal systems become load-bearing walls — and nobody realizes it until one gets removed.
What happens when that person leaves
The successor inherits the role but not the knowledge. They don’t know which suppliers are reliable. They don’t know which rep at the flavor house is responsive. They don’t know that the organic cert from Supplier A is due next month or that Supplier B’s spec was updated in February and the co-man still has the old version.
The first six months are a reconstruction effort. The same CoAs get requested for the second time. The coordination tax doubles during the transition — and some of the knowledge never comes back.
If your most important supply chain data would leave the company when a specific person does, you don’t have a system. You have a liability.
Building knowledge that persists
The fix isn’t forcing people to update a shared spreadsheet (they won’t). It’s capturing the information they’re already generating — every supplier email, every quote, every cert, every spec — into a shared system of record that builds itself from the work the team is already doing. The Rolodex becomes a database. The spreadsheet becomes a system.
