Once you've found good suppliers, a strategic question follows: do you concentrate your spend with one, or spread it across several? Neither answer is universally right — it's a trade-off between simplicity and resilience.
Single-sourcing
Consolidating with one supplier buys you leverage (better pricing at volume), simplicity (one relationship to manage), and depth (they learn your needs). The cost is concentration risk: if they fail, raise prices, or hit capacity, you have no fallback.
Multi-sourcing
Spreading across suppliers buys resilience and keeps competitive pressure on price and service. The cost is overhead — more relationships, more qualification, smaller volume discounts.
The middle path
Dual-sourcing — a primary supplier plus a qualified backup — captures most of the resilience of multi-sourcing without the full overhead.
Match the strategy to the risk: single-source low-stakes commodities, but never let a business-critical input depend on a single supplier with no alternative.
SourceWright helps you keep qualified alternatives on hand, so your sourcing strategy is a choice — not an accident.