Procurement Sense

You're right, here it is with everything removed: Here's a question I've started asking manufacturing leadership teams, and it tends to land differently than they expect: "If your biggest single source supplier called you tomorrow and said they couldn't ship for 90 days, what percentage of your annual revenue would be at risk?" Most people pause. Some go quiet. A few reach for a calculator. The honest answer, for most manufacturers, is that they don't actually know. And that'

By Michael Crocefoglia | Managing Director, Atlas Procurement Solution Let me share something that came up in a conversation with a manufacturing client last quarter. They had 47 active suppliers across a single component category. Forty-seven. When we mapped it out together, the top six were delivering over 85% of the volume. The rest were tail spend, small orders, high admin burden, inconsistent quality, zero negotiating leverage. That's not a supply base. That's organized

If you’re running a business in the United States right now, you don’t need us to tell you that things feel tight. Really tight. The numbers coming out of the NFIB and industry surveys aren’t just statistics—they’re the lived reality for thousands of firms across the country. The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index edged up to 99.0 in November 2025, but it remains below its 52-year average, and there’s a palpable sense that the cost pressures squeezing margins aren’t letting u