Your specification is now your supplier’s capability list

Depending on one supplier rarely shows up as a higher unit price. It shows up somewhere much harder to see, and much harder to reverse.

By Steve 5 min read
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Most businesses that depend heavily on a single supplier have already checked the obvious thing. They benchmark the unit price, find it competitive, and conclude the concentration is fine. Sometimes it is. But unit price is the one place where dependency is least likely to appear, because a supplier who understands their position has every reason to keep the headline number defensible. The cost turns up elsewhere: in what you stop selling, in what you stop learning, and in what it would take to leave. Nobody decides to single-source Concentration…

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