Supply Chain & Procurement

Frontier hardware usually depends on a small number of suppliers, sometimes one. That concentration, not price, is the risk that ends up on the board agenda: a single qualified vendor for a critical component, in a jurisdiction you do not control, with a lead time longer than your product cycle.

This unit works on both sides of that. Supplier strategy and qualification to widen the base, dual sourcing where it can be justified, and inventory and contract terms that buy time when something breaks. Cost negotiation matters too, but resilience is usually worth more than the last few points of margin.

Procurement design is the other half. Who can commit spend, what gets tendered, how technical requirements are written so they do not accidentally specify one vendor, and how supplier performance is measured after the contract is signed. Most procurement functions in scaling companies were built for a smaller business and quietly stopped working.

Typical mandates: a sourcing strategy for a constrained component, supplier qualification for a new build, a procurement redesign after a supply shock, or a cost programme with a hard target.