How many suppliers should your business really be buying from?

Résumé détaillé

How many suppliers keep your workplace running, and what is it really costing you? Daniel O'Halloran, commercial director of Complete Office Supplies (COS), explains why the true…

How many suppliers does it take to keep your workplace running? If you need to open an Excel spreadsheet to look up the number, you’re not alone.

Typically, a small business might manage between 5 to 20 suppliers while medium to large workplaces can have potentially hundreds of suppliers.

For example, a multi-site health practice might juggle PPE, hygiene and cleaning supplies, reception stationery and kitchen supplies, with each site placing its own orders, logging into separate portals, raising multiple invoices and coordinating deliveries and backorders.

Multiply these steps for every supplier and every order, and an already time-poor operations manager or business owner has lost precious work time.

Daniel O’Halloran, commercial director at COS, says businesses tend to focus only on the price of supplies and overlook the hidden costs incurred in the buying process.

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“We surveyed 1001 Australian employees in June 2026. A major finding was that transaction costs are approximately two and a half times more than the prices of the products because of process inefficiencies,” O’Halloran tells SmartCompany.

“Buyers experience platform and supplier fatigue because of managing multiple vendors, ordering platforms and delivery schedules.”

In fact, 56% of employees surveyed by COS said fewer systems would improve productivity because they spent too much time working out which one to use and how.

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