Genuine question for anyone who works in procurement or operations at a distribution company.
I’ve been speaking with a lot of purchasing managers and operations directors at small and mid-sized distributors — companies with 30-150 active suppliers doing $2M-$20M in revenue.
What I keep hearing is that most of them have no real early warning system for supplier problems. They find out a supplier is failing when a delivery doesn’t show up, when a client calls angry, or when an auditor flags an expired insurance certificate.
By then the damage is already done.
I’ve been building something that tries to solve this — automated supplier risk scoring, document expiry tracking, and a weekly plain English report that tells purchasing teams which suppliers need attention before problems happen.
Before I go further I want to sanity check a few things with people who actually live this:
1. Is this actually a widespread problem or do most distributors have better systems than I think?
2. What does a typical $5M-$15M distributor currently use to track supplier performance — if anything?
3. When a supplier causes a serious problem at that company size — what does it actually cost them? Time, money, client relationships?
4. Is $400-700 per month a number that would make a purchasing manager laugh or take seriously?
Not pitching anything — genuinely trying to understand if I’m solving a real problem or an imaginary one. Harsh feedback welcome.