Dual Source

Every critical part has two approved suppliers, two contracts and two prices, and every risk register says so. Open a map and put a pin in each of them, then measure the distance between the pins.

The pins are forty minutes apart. Both plants sit on the same road, in the same valley, because that is where the skill for this process has been for sixty years and that is where the people who do it live. Both buy their raw material from the same mill, two hours further along the same road, and neither of them mentions it, because nobody asked and it has never mattered.

Dual sourcing is written as a commercial control and it is audited as one: two contracts, two quality approvals, two price lists, two sets of accounts. Every one of those is a real check and every one of them is done properly. Correlated risk, though, is a geography question and a supply-chain question, and neither of those appears on the form a buyer is asked to complete.

The bill arrives all at once, which is the whole point of it. One flood, one strike, one fire, one road closed, and two independent suppliers stop on the same morning. The register is still correct. It was answering a different question.

So a dual-source list is worth one afternoon with a map: how far apart are they, and what do they both buy from? Two suppliers on the same road are one supplier with two invoices, and the register will keep saying otherwise until the morning it doesn’t matter.

Where this shows up: Operating partner — reading the operation from outside, and taking the seat if it needs filling.