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A plant manager consolidates all MRO purchasing onto one national distributor's punch-out catalog. It's a sensible move on paper — one login, one invoice cycle, volume pricing, a vendor-managed crib stocked with the fast-moving items. For eighteen months it works exactly as intended. Then a specific imported bearing fails on a critical gearbox, the distributor's system shows it as available, and it takes three days for anyone to discover that "available" meant available throu

A production line goes down at 2 a.m. because a proximity sensor failed. The part itself costs less than a hundred dollars. But the line stays down for three days because nobody on the buying side had a relationship with a supplier who could get it fast, verify it was the right revision, and ship it with usable documentation. That's the moment most plants realize their real exposure isn't the part—it's the distributor behind it. Procurement teams tend to evaluate mro distribu