Every manufacturer has components with exactly one source. Some are deliberate strategic decisions. Many are accidents — a second supplier drifted away, a specification narrowed until only one company could meet it, or volume consolidated for good commercial reasons and nobody registered what was lost. The accidental ones are usually the more dangerous, because they’re not on anyone’s list.
Find Them First
Start with a real inventory: every component where you have one qualified supplier and no approved substitute. Include components technically available elsewhere but where qualification, tooling, or customer approval would take months — those are effectively single-source for continuity purposes even if procurement records show alternatives.
Then rank by consequence: what a stoppage costs per week, and how long recovery would take. That second number usually determines priority more than the first.
Choose a Strategy Per Component
Qualify a second source. The strongest answer where feasible. Costs engineering time and validation, and the alternative needs occasional orders to stay genuinely live — a supplier you last bought from three years ago is a name in a file.
Hold strategic stock sized to the substitution lead time, not to a standard cover period. If replacing the supplier would take five months, a month of buffer isn’t a continuity plan.
Secure the means of production. For tooled components, own the tooling and know where it is. Hold current drawings and specifications yourself rather than relying on the supplier’s copies. This is frequently the difference between a three-month recovery and a twelve-month one.
Design out the dependency. The most complete solution and the slowest — worth initiating for your highest-exposure items even though the payoff is years away.
Accept it explicitly. Some exposures aren’t worth mitigating. Recording that as a decision, with reasoning, is legitimate; leaving it unexamined isn’t.
Write The Plan Short
A continuity plan nobody can read during a crisis is decoration. One page per critical component: what it is, what it feeds, current stock and coverage, the alternative if any and its lead time, tooling location and ownership, who decides, and the first three actions.
Those first three actions matter most. In the initial hours the question isn’t strategy, it’s what to do right now — and having that written down calmly in advance is worth more than a thorough document produced under pressure.
Monitor the Ones You’re Carrying
For accepted single-source exposures, watch the supplier more closely than others: financial health, delivery and quality trends, ownership changes, capacity signals. Early warning converts a crisis into a managed transition, and for a sole source that difference is usually measured in months of production.
Watch for New Ones Forming
Single-source positions are created continuously by ordinary decisions — consolidating volume, tightening a specification, dropping a supplier whose price crept up. Add a check to your sourcing process: does this decision remove an alternative? If yes, that should be a conscious trade-off rather than a side effect.
ticktick.ai identifies single-source exposure from live sourcing data and flags decisions that would eliminate a remaining qualified alternative.
