Factory & Production

The phrase contract manufacturer covers three different arrangements, and the difference decides who owns the design, the tooling and the certification file. Two suppliers can both describe themselves as a contract manufacturer while offering arrangements t……

Two numbers describe a vendor relationship better than any scorecard: the share of volume sitting on one supplier, and the number of qualified alternatives. When the first is high and the second is zero, the buyer has a dependency rather …

An audit found the same two findings three years running. The findings had been written correctly each time, discussed, and closed; nobody had owned the change, so the same two observations were waiting at the next visit. The problem was …

Three quotations arrive against one request, and two of them are not comparable until the scopes are aligned. The gap is rarely in the unit price: it sits in the packaging line, the certification scope or the delivery term, and …

Two requests went out for the same product. The first asked for a price on a 65 W charger at a thousand pieces, and produced three numbers that could not be compared. The second defined the configuration, the markets, the …

The procurement model that looks cheapest on the invoice is often the one with the highest total cost, because the risk it leaves with the buyer does not appear until it materialises. Three models cover most charger programmes, and the …

Two due diligence files were handed over for the same size of supplier. One contained certificates, a price list and a catalogue; the other contained registration documents, a dated capacity schedule, the certification scopes, a continuity statement and the……

Four claims decide most supplier choices: who the company is, what platform it runs, what the certification covers, and whether it has capacity in the months you need. Each of them can be verified from a desk, and each takes …

Two suppliers were qualified in the same month against the same criteria and both passed. One delivered three orders on schedule; the other missed the third, because its line had been committed elsewhere and nobody had asked for a schedule. …

A brand paid a trading company's margin and still dealt with the factory's quality problem. The supplier had been honest about its role; the brand had assumed that the relationship came with process control, and the assumption survived until the …

The most expensive sourcing decision is usually the one that looked cheapest at the quotation stage. Five assumptions sit behind that pattern, and each of them survives because it is true often enough to be repeated, and wrong often enough …

Two sourcing projects started in the same month with the same product. One ended in a pilot order that matched the specification; the other ended in a second round of quotations, because the first brief had been a conversation and …