A Tier-3 disruption, caught in real time
A customer ran the disruption playbook on a sub-supplier they'd never directly spoken to. Two weeks of warning instead of two days.
Emre Ik
Co-founder
A Tier-1 automotive supplier we work with had a near miss in March. The way they caught it surprised me enough to write down.
Their finished product depends on a stamped part they buy from a Tier-2 in central Anatolia. The Tier-2 buys the cold-rolled coil from a Tier-3 in central Europe. The Tier-1 has never had a direct relationship with the Tier-3. They don't buy from them, they don't have a contract with them, they don't even have an account manager's phone number.
On a Tuesday morning at 9:14, the watch agent flagged a slow-developing pattern: the Tier-3 had been late on three different acknowledgments to three different European customers over the previous ten days. None of these involved our customer's Tier-2. None of them involved our customer at all. But the pattern was consistent with an upstream supply problem.
The walk-back
At 9:21 the agent did the walk-back. It traced the open POs from the Tier-1 that depended on parts from that Tier-2, and from there to the parts that depended on coil from the Tier-3. Three SKUs, one of them on the production schedule for the following week.
At 9:23 it pinged the planner with a written summary: upstream signal suggests the Tier-3 is having a problem. Here are the three affected SKUs. Here's the production schedule impact. Here are two alternative Tier-3s we could ask the Tier-2 to source from.
The human part
The planner picked up the phone and called the Tier-2 procurement lead. By 10:30, the Tier-2 confirmed they'd had a slow week from the Tier-3 and were already in conversation with them. The Tier-1 didn't change anything immediately, but they put a pre-order in on one of the alternatives so the qualification could start in parallel.
Eleven days later, the Tier-3 had a confirmed production stop. Three of the Tier-2's European customers ended up with a stockout. Our Tier-1 customer had already received the first qualification samples from the alternative and was two weeks ahead of every other Tier-2 customer in the queue.
What worked here, and what we got lucky on
What worked: pattern detection across a public signal the customer didn't even know they were watching. The agent watches supplier disclosures, late acknowledgments to other parties, news mentions, regulatory filings. Most of the time none of these matter for our customer. Once in a while they correlate into something useful.
What we got lucky on: the alternative Tier-3 existed and had qualified material available. If the failure mode had been "there's only one supplier for this grade," the early warning would have been less valuable.
The honest read on this is that the agent didn't save the day. It just bought time. Time is the resource that's hardest to manufacture in a supply disruption. Buying twelve days of it changed the conversation from triage to choice.
The supply chain agents are in private beta. If you're running a Tier-1 or Tier-2 operation and you want to see what the watch picks up on your suppliers, talk to us.