Aishwarya
Khatawkar

The moment I mapped the vendor base against the spend, the opportunity was obvious. Machining is a leverage commodity - abundant supplier options in low-cost and best-cost countries, low switching costs, no special fixtures required to move business.

But beyond the commercial logic, something else struck me. We were over-relying on high-cost country vendors simply because those were the ones who had been selling to us for years. Eastern European best-cost vendors - perfectly capable, geographically close - were barely being used. Not because they were worse. Just because nobody had looked.

I started by building two things simultaneously: a thorough evaluation of all 89 vendors across eight dimensions, and a communications energy matrix - mapping how much time and effort each vendor was consuming versus the value they were delivering. That energy matrix was as revealing as any spend report.

There was one vendor that stays with me - a cylinder supplier based in France. For three consecutive quarters: always late, constant quality issues. My supply chain colleague was spending almost three hours every week just following up with them. My quality engineer was regularly pulled in.

Before making any decision, I gave them a formal three-month improvement window. We invested real effort during those months. And I was honest with myself - some of what I saw might have been genuine improvement starting to take hold.

But the pattern was consistent. After three months without the results we needed, I informed them we would be moving away. The conversation was difficult. The vendor took it personally. Said they would fix lead times. Could invest. Needed more support from our side.

The offboarding process was more complex than the decision itself. I coordinated across finance, warehouse, engineering, legal, and - critically - did a group-level check to ensure no other Atlas Copco entity would be blindsided. Where they were, I involved that buyer before any announcement went out.

I realized all our parts ran through the same manufacturing line. Instead of forecasting by SKU - which required accurate demand signals we didn't have - we could book the line's weekly capacity as a block and decide what went through it 15 days ahead, based on actual confirmed requirements.

I set up a bi-weekly call between myself, our demand planner, and the vendor to lock the following two weeks' mix. The vendor got guaranteed utilization. We got confirmed delivery. Both sides won.

The hardest part was convincing engineering. Leybold was engineering-led - procurement was not traditionally seen as a design-phase function. I started by attending design reviews as an observer, asking questions rather than making demands, and demonstrating that I understood the engineering constraints.

Once that credibility was there, I proposed formal early supplier involvement: three of our best vendors under NDA, brought into the design phase to flag manufacturability issues early, weekly reviews, and then a competitive bid once the design was frozen.

I audited all 7 templates with legal and regional VPs. Built a master agreement covering 80% of shared terms, with country-specific appendices for the remaining 20%. The goal was one framework that any entity in the group could use without a full legal review for every new vendor.

I visited the supplier facility and spent time on the floor - not just in the meeting room. I walked the process from raw material receipt through casting, fettling, and storage. That's where I found it: cast parts were being stored in an open area with no humidity control. The moisture was causing micro-porosity and surface defects that looked like metallurgy problems but were actually a storage and handling issue.

The solution was a controlled storage area - enclosed, with humidity monitoring. No new tooling. No material changes. No process redesign. Just a different way of handling what was already being produced.