The supplier was planning capacity against press releases
A corporate strategy and planning function at an automotive supplier was deciding how much capacity to build and where. Its customers had announced that they were moving production closer to the markets they sell into, and the supplier had to decide how much of its own money to put behind those announcements, in plants, in tooling and in people.
Announcements are made publicly, for reasons that include supply resilience and reasons that include politics. What decides whether volume actually moves is landed cost, the cost of shifting tooling from one plant to another, and whether the receiving plant can hold quality at full production rate. None of that appears in a press release, and the people who know it sit on different sides of the same award.
We put the buying side and the receiving side together
We convened a panel across both sides of a sourcing award. Former purchasing leads write the decision to place work with a supplier. Plant directors receive that work and have to make it at rate. Program managers move the tooling between the two. Asked separately, those three seats describe different worlds, so we put them in one conversation.
The panel was built for disagreement rather than agreement, and we chaired it so the gap between what a customer had said publicly and what it had actually committed became explicit. Where the seats disagreed we stayed on it, because the conditions attached to an award are where the answer sits. Coverage followed the corridors the volume would actually move along. Every expert cleared our compliance checks before the session.
The conditions attached to each award were named
The panel separated the announcements likely to convert from those still carrying conditions, and said what those conditions were. The planning already under way had assumed a simultaneous wave. What the panel described was a staggered arrival.
The supplier planned for the staggered version. That reduced the capital committed up front and improved the return on what was committed. The panel members stayed available through the planning cycle, so a question as later awards landed did not start a fresh search.
