Customer Overview
Founded in 1884 in Dayton, OH and moved its headquarters to Atlanta, GA in 2009
Customer Name: NCR
Location: Based in midtown Atlanta
Products include: Point of Sale systems, ATMs, retail store automation, and self-service kiosks
Market cap: $3.6B
Annual Revenue: $7.8B in 2022
Employees: 38,000
Business Need
NCR needed chips fast to meet their SLA with a key customer, but the chips were out of stock through authorized channels and brokers were quoting NCR 10x the usual price.
One pillar of NCR’s business model is continued maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) of existing customer ATMs. NCR deploys technicians into the field to assess the repair needs for the ATMs, and they’re either able to repair them at the customer’s location or bring the ATMs back to a regional center for repair.
These ATMs can range from units recently sold to ones that have been in operation for more than 15 years. In the latter case, the components used in the manufacturing process have likely been deprecated entirely or updated to newer versions. When this happens, it's difficult to procure the components needed for the repair, threatening NCR's ability to deliver on their promise to customers.
When NCR approached Amplio, they required 500 units of an Allegro MOSFET for a repair order. Typically, NCR orders these components through their Contract Manufacturer (CM), Jabil, who then sources directly from the manufacturer, Allegro. Neither Allegro nor the major global distributors had any inventory available until 2024 for this particular component, stopping the repair job dead in its tracks.
When a component shortage like this is recognized, the CM will usually pass the responsibility back to the OEM to resolve the shortage by sourcing on the secondary market through brokers. That’s what happened here, and NCR’s procurement team has brokers with whom they typically resolve these types of shortages. Unfortunately, the brokers quoted incredibly high prices for the components, eroding the margin for the job.
Amplio’s Solution
Though our end-to-end procurement solution typically reduces our customers’ need to source from brokers by 80%, we know that sometimes there’s just no other option. That’s why we have experts on staff that navigate the secondary market on our customers’ behalf, finding inventory and deals that others can’t for those difficult shortages.
In this case, we were able to find 500 units of the Allegro MOSFET from our trusted sources that were quality-tested with date codes +22 to satisfy NCR’s quality requirements. Additionally, the price at which Amplio was able to procure the components was $150 per component less expensive than the options brought forward by the NCR team.
Business Results
By connecting NCR to Amplio’s trusted secondary network, not only were we able to resolve their critical shortage and avoid the cost of customer downtime, but we also saved them $75,000 in procurement costs for this single order. NCR has subsequently completed a second order with Amplio bringing the total cost savings to $150,000.
