Context
A German operator of institutional catering facilities — supplying corporate canteens, hospital foodservice, and large-scale event catering — had reached a scale where its equipment and consumable sourcing no longer made sense. The company purchased through a fragmented mix of German distributors, a single direct relationship with a Guangdong cookware factory, and a domestic uniform supplier, producing a procurement structure that was administratively heavy, margin-inefficient, and operationally unreliable. The commercial trigger for change was a planned expansion: six new sites over eighteen months, requiring simultaneous equipping across five categories — professional cookware, smallwares, storage and shelving, cleaning equipment, and staff uniforms. Sourcing these domestically at the required volume was not viable; sourcing them from five separate Chinese suppliers individually was beyond the company's internal procurement bandwidth.
Our Mission
Design and manage a consolidated sourcing structure that could deliver all five product categories from Chinese manufacturing within a single commercial and logistical framework — single point of invoicing, consolidated freight, euro-denominated billing, and first delivery within sixteen weeks for the priority categories needed at the first two new sites.
Our Approach
Each category required different sourcing geographies — cookware and smallwares in Jiangmen and Foshan, storage in Guangzhou and Dongguan, cleaning equipment across the Pearl River Delta and Zhejiang, uniforms in Zhongshan, Shunde, and the Shaoxing textile cluster. MAXAM's supplier survey identified eighteen candidates, reduced to nine on document review, then to six after physical assessment (eliminating a trading company posing as a manufacturer, a smallwares supplier with inconsistent batch records, and a uniform factory whose capacity claim was not supported by its verified machine count). The six remaining suppliers were audited over a coordinated five-day period, and findings consolidated into a single comparative report covering production maturity, compliance documentation, defect data, and capacity verification. Commercial consolidation was structured through a Hong Kong trading entity acting as the single contractual counterparty: all six Chinese manufacturers contracted with the HK intermediary, the German client contracted with the HK intermediary, invoicing in euros on net-30 terms, supplier payments in RMB and USD managed by MAXAM. Where shipment timing aligned across categories — which it did for the first two openings — outputs were consolidated into single full-container loads from a Guangzhou consolidation warehouse. The first consolidated shipment (cookware, smallwares, storage, cleaning) arrived at the German warehouse in week fourteen, two weeks ahead of the sixteen-week target; uniforms followed in week eighteen due to embroidery and size-range lead times. Across the eighteen-month expansion programme, MAXAM managed three further consolidated shipments on the same structure, equipping all six new sites under one supplier framework.
Before & After Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement cost vs. domestic baseline | Index 100 | Index 69 (-31%) |
| Active supplier relationships (client side) | 5+ across distributors and direct | 1 (HK intermediary) |
| Invoice currencies handled by client | EUR / RMB / USD | EUR only |
| First multi-category shipment | Target 16 weeks | Delivered week 14 |
"The cost saving was the headline number, but the administrative simplification was what changed how we operated. We went from managing five import relationships in three currencies to a single euro invoice covering all five categories, with one quality framework behind it. MAXAM's cross-supplier audit was the prerequisite that made the consolidation trustworthy."
Director of Procurement
Director of Procurement — German Institutional Catering Operator