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Technical Sourcing

The process

You brief. We work a stage. You review it, then decide.

There is no retainer, no minimum term and no assumption that a stage leads to the next one. Work is bought a stage at a time, delivered into a workspace only your organisation can open, and reviewed by you before anything continues.

Nothing here arrives as an email attachment. A forwarded spreadsheet loses the one thing a finding is worth anything for — who established it, when, and against what.

In order

Six steps, and the loop between the last two

Steps three to five repeat once per stage. That repetition is the product: each pass ends with a decision you make on evidence rather than on our enthusiasm.
01

You tell us what you need

A category, a volume, a destination, a deadline, and the constraint that would kill the purchase. We turn that into a written requirement set — attribute by attribute, in your units — and send it back for correction before anything is priced.

You do

Describe the situation in your own words, including the parts that are not settled yet.

We do

Ask the questions a Chinese factory will ask, and write the answers down in a form they can be tested against.

Not yet

No supplier is contacted at this point, and no fee is due for the conversation.
02

We agree a charter

One document: the stage being bought, what it will produce, what it explicitly excludes, what it costs, and the commercial boundary — that you contract and pay the manufacturer, and that we hold neither your money nor the goods. You accept it in the portal, and the acceptance is recorded with your name and the moment.

You do

Read the exclusions first, then accept or send it back.

We do

State the scope narrowly enough that either of us can tell whether it has been met.

Fixed from here

Once accepted, the charter does not change quietly. A change of scope is a new agreement, visible as one.
03

We work the stage

In Shenzhen, in Chinese, with the companies themselves. Registers are read, licences are collected, catalogues are pulled and compared, and questions are put to people directly rather than through a form. Findings are written into your workspace as they are established, not assembled into a report at the end.

You do

Nothing, unless we hit a question only you can answer — in which case you get it in the portal, not buried in a thread.

We do

The checking, and the recording of what could not be established.

What you will see

Work in progress, honestly labelled. A stage that is half done looks half done.
04

You review it in the portal

Your workspace holds the findings, the documents behind them, the quotations as received, and the comparison at your target quantity. Every finding carries who checked it, when, and against which document — so you can disagree with a specific one instead of with the whole report.

You do

Read it, and put questions against the findings you doubt. Questions are threaded against the finding itself.

We do

Answer in the same place, on the record.

Not in email

There is one copy. It cannot be forwarded into a version nobody can attribute.
05

You approve the stage

Approval is an act with your name on it, recorded with the time. It means the stage delivered what the charter said it would — not that you agree with every conclusion inside it. Where a finding is still open, it stays open and visible.

You do

Approve, or say what is missing.

We do

Close the stage, or finish the part that was not done. Both are recorded.

No auto-advance

An unapproved stage does not roll into the next one because time passed.
06

We go on — or we stop

The next stage is a decision, not a default. If the answer is that this category does not work at your volume, or that you now have enough to act alone, stopping is a legitimate outcome and everything produced so far stays in your workspace.

You do

Commission the next stage, pause, or stop.

We do

Tell you plainly when we think you should stop.

If you stop

You keep the requirement set, the findings, the documents and the translations.

The part most buyers ask about first

You contract with the factory. You pay the factory. Nothing routes through us.

We never hold client funds and never take title to goods. The quotations you see are the manufacturer’s own figures, reaching you unchanged, and no account on our side is able to alter one.

This is why the fee is per stage and stated in advance. An intermediary whose income depends on the order closing cannot give you an honest reading of the supplier who would close it.

The workspace

Why the work is delivered into a credentialed portal

This is a deliberate constraint rather than a feature list. It costs us the convenience of attaching a spreadsheet, and it buys you the ability to trust what you are reading six months later.

One copy, not a chain of forwards

An emailed comparison is unattributable the moment it is forwarded. Three versions circulate, the numbers drift, and nobody can say which one the decision was made on. The portal holds one, and it is current by definition.

Every finding carries its provenance

Who checked it, when, and against which document. A finding without that is an opinion with a tick beside it — it cannot be re-checked, argued with, or relied on by anyone who was not in the room.

Absence is shown as absence

A check we have not completed reads as not established, in the quietest treatment on the page. It never renders as a zero and never quietly rounds up into a confirmation to make a stage look finished.

Your data is yours alone

Supplier identities, verification findings and quoted pricing are not shared between clients. Access is by issued credential — there is no public registration on the portal at all.

Where a price came from matters as much as the price.A number in a chat window with no minimum order quantity, no lead time and no validity period is recorded as indicative, and it is labelled that way wherever it appears. It is never promoted into the comparison as though it were a quotation.

Timing and cost

What we will and will not promise

We do not publish a turnaround, because a stage takes as long as the slowest factory takes to answer, and any number written here would be a number invented for a brochure. What we will do is give you a considered estimate for your specific stage before you commit to it, and tell you when it slips.

Fees are quoted per stage in the charter, in advance, and there is no commission anywhere in the arrangement. If a stage turns out to be smaller than expected — a category with four real manufacturers rather than forty — we say so rather than filling the time.

The pace you can control is the review. A stage waiting on an approval is a stage not being worked, so the one thing worth committing to at the start is who on your side reads the findings and how quickly.

What we are not

  • Not a trading company. We do not sell you goods.
  • Not a freight forwarder or a customs broker.
  • Not an agent for any factory, and not paid by one.
  • Not a holder of your money at any point in the engagement.

Where one of those services is genuinely needed, we will tell you what applies and who provides it — and you will engage them yourself.

Keep reading

How we verify a supplier

The checks in the order we run them, what each one proves, and what it cannot tell you.

The seven stages

What each stage produces, what you keep, and where each one explicitly stops.

What we source

Security and surveillance hardware, and the six purchases hiding inside one.

The client portal does not accept public registration. Credentials are issued when an engagement begins, and everything inside a workspace is confidential to that organisation.