COMMUNITY FIBRE
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Community Fibre serves
Londoners across 29 boroughs in the capital
Moving from the ‘ community ’ element of his job to the ‘ fibre ’ part , Brooman emphasises that the company is facing serious supply challenges , just like everyone else .
Strong supplier network vital for Community Fibre Asked what the main challenges are , Brooman says : “ We ' ve got the chip-set shortage , which is creating quite an issue for us . Because the big players are taking so much of the supply , we ' ve had to be quite clever about the way that we ' re ordering . We ' ve seen some lead times in excess of 60 weeks from some of our suppliers , where they were traditionally 12 to 26 weeks .”
Plus , the company is almost doubling in size year-on-year , which is compounding these supply problems .
Brooman says : “ We are enjoying exceptionally fast growth , so forecasting far in advance is obviously prone to errors , which means we have to be flexible and quick to react .”
As such , strong relationships with Community Fibre ’ s supply chain is vital .
“ Furnishing suppliers with robust and accurate forecasts as early as we can is important . We try to get products onto a purchase order as soon as we can , to help offset some of the challenges that we ' re seeing . Purchase orders always trump forecasts ,” states Brooman .
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