Procurement and supply chain leadership for companies about to outgrow how they've been operating.
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Procurement and supply chain leadership for companies about to outgrow how they've been operating.
Start a ConversationProcurement as a Capability
A supply base that worked at five million in revenue often isn't the one that works at fifty. The suppliers haven't changed, the relationships are still informal and nobody's been assigned to watch the risk as it grows.
The questions procurement needs to answer start to change:
Can our suppliers actually support the next stage of growth?
Where are we single sourced, and do we know it?
Do we understand a supplier's real capability and capacity, or just their quote?
Are we quietly paying for problems through poor quality, expedites, or excess inventory?
What happens if a critical supplier fails next month?
Do we have qualified alternatives now, or only after something breaks?
Many companies can't answer these questions with confidence, and the reason is usually that nothing has gone wrong yet.
What I Do
I help companies build the procurement capability their growth requires. That starts with understanding where the supply base is constraining the business, then putting the right sourcing, supplier management, risk, and accountability mechanisms in place. It's usually not a people problem. It's the processes people are working within that need to change.
Engagements are built around the problem that needs to be solved and the processes that need to be refined, with the goal being to leave behind a procurement organization capable of supporting the company's next phase of growth.
Supplier qualification, factory assessment, quality systems, and development. Understanding what a supplier can actually deliver, and building the accountability to make sure they do it consistently.
Supplier quality and performanceSourcing strategy, supplier selection, negotiation, and category management. Building the right supply base and making sourcing decisions based on total cost, not just the quoted price.
Strategic sourcing and procurementIdentifying supplier concentration, capability, and continuity risk, and turning it into a documented, prioritized mitigation plan instead of a worry with no owner.
Supply chain riskSenior procurement and supply chain leadership on a fractional or interim basis, for companies building a function, navigating a leadership gap, or facing a challenge that needs sustained ownership.
Fractional and interim leadershipWhat You're Left With
The specifics depend on the engagement, but the intent doesn't: everything I build is meant to be operated by your own team after I've gone.
A supplier risk register - every vendor scored for sourcing risk and business impact, with re-sourcing timescales, a contingency plan, and a named owner against each one.
Supplier agreements and terms - renegotiated where there is room, and written so the obligations on both sides are clear before there is a problem.
A development plan and a re-sourcing roadmap - what to fix at the suppliers worth keeping, and what to line up behind the ones that aren't.
Scorecards and a review cadence - the measures your team runs monthly or quarterly, so supplier performance is a standing item rather than an escalation.
A written report with owners and dates - prioritized, and specific enough to act on. A finding with no owner is just an opinion.
Representative Engagement
A manufacturer asked me to review a supply base it had grown into rather than designed. I assessed nine vendors across Taiwan and China on site. The cost reductions I negotiated along the way were the least interesting part of the engagement. These were the findings that mattered.
A component supplier nobody was watching. Fasteners and pins. Low value, low attention, and no alternative source: six months minimum to qualify a replacement, other vendors dependent on those parts to complete their own assemblies, and an elderly owner with no succession plan. One retirement would have taken an entire product line offline in a business with a short selling season. Nothing about that supplier had ever gone wrong, which is exactly why nobody had looked at it. The recommendation was a season of safety stock ordered immediately, and a second source developed in parallel.
A contract manufacturer that confused inspection with control. Sole source for the finished product, twelve to twenty-four months to replace, and a quality approach that amounted to overproducing and sorting at the end. Rather than recommend they walk, I put a costed containment plan in front of senior management alongside a staged exit, so that fixing it never cost them continuity of supply.
A packaging item that should never have existed. One consumable, bought every year in nine different varieties, for something the customer removed and threw away. Nine SKUs, nine pallet positions, and order quantities too small for any vendor to want the work. The root cause was organizational rather than commercial: procurement was not in the room when design and marketing locked the specification, so by the time the buyer saw it there was nothing left to influence.
A risk register the team could run. Every vendor scored for sourcing risk and business impact, with re-sourcing timescales, contingency plans and a named owner, on a quarterly review cycle.
That is the part that outlasts the engagement: the next problem gets found while it is still cheap to fix.
Get in Touch
Tell me what you're working on. If I can help, I'll say so. If I can't, I'll say that too.
Based in Vancouver, BC. I work with organizations across North America and internationally.