A technical procurement department in China, without hiring one.
Eight hours a month of senior lighting-engineering support on retainer. Supplier checks, specification reviews, price sanity checks, quarterly briefings — answers within 24 hours, with your supply chain already in context.
The questions too small to ask. Until they aren't.
Retainer clients tell us the same thing: they don't need another project — they need someone to ask.
Every small question becomes a project.
Is this price normal? Is this new factory safe? Can this datasheet be trusted? Each question is too small to commission a study — so it goes unasked.
Changes happen in silence.
Your factory changes a capacitor brand, a cable supplier, a housing batch — and you find out at the complaint, or never.
Knowledge leaves with the agent.
Your last agent knew which factory to avoid and why. Then they moved on, and the knowledge moved with them.
Onboard once. Then a rhythm: monthly, quarterly, annually.
The first month builds context; every answer after that comes with your supply chain already loaded.
Onboarding — week 1
Supply-chain profile: your factories, products, standards, pain points. Two pages, done once.
Monthly
8-hour pool: spec reviews, price sanity checks, factory questions. Plus 2 supplier background checks — facts only.
Quarterly
30–45 minute briefing call: LED & driver price movements, component shortages, regulation changes, your order rhythm.
Annually
Free supplier re-screen — desktop review of your key factories against the current picture.
The whole cooperation on one page.
Lanes are the parties. Left to right is time. Dashed orange lines are money flows — note that none of them passes through our lane.
A working rhythm, not a stack of paper.
The deliverables are light by design — the value is the answer, not the report.
Three plans. No auto-renewal.
Hours pool quarterly, so a quiet month isn't wasted. Overflow hours are pre-approved — no surprise invoices.
30-day exit with pro-rata refund at any time. No auto-renewal. Your archive is handed over within one day.
Why a retainer can't drift into dependence.
The same independence rules as every other service, plus the ones specific to ongoing work.
One factory question is enough to start.
Ask the first question.
One question is enough to see how this works. Tell us your product range and the things you keep having to check — the reply shows what a monthly pool would cover.
Retained Technical Procurement
One form for this service. The engineer who would run the case reads every message — no autoresponder, no newsletter, no sales sequence.
- 01First reply within 24 hours, Mon–Fri.
- 02Scope and a fixed price before any work starts.
- 03Your details stay yours — GDPR-compliant, deletable on request.