you might gain two or three weeks of reaction time on top of your existing inventory. That speed and insight really makes a difference in protecting the business.
Q: WHERE SHOULD MANUFACTURERS BEGIN WHEN LOOKING TO DIVERSIFY THEIR SUPPLY BASE? Martin: The car industry has been going through intellectual somersaults on this. Traditionally, we’ ve gone single-source for core commodities because tooling costs are such a big investment.
The question has been: how do we analyse which commodities to consider diversifying and localising? At Aston Martin, we’ re a very different beast: very low-volume, very high-value cars. When you consider the total cost of acquisition and trade off higher piece prices against lower logistics costs, less tied-up capital, lower lead times and less need to discount cars built without customers, it changes the equation. We could increase the piece price by double-digit percentage points and it’ s still end-to-end lower cost than taking the low-cost solution with a long lead time and higher-risk supply chain.
94 January 2026