A Quorum Needs Every Tier at the Table

By Dolores Sanders and Dorian Smellie, TotalControlPro

We back John Robinson’s diagnosis. Transformation fails because the system is built on silos and sequential, competitive buying. Our addition, from more than a decade of building software for SME manufacturers: the quorum has to reach down the supply chain, and the OEMs and Primes at the top of it are the ones best placed to convene it.

The Quorum Principle™ white paper asks a question most of the industry has stopped asking: why do so many transformation programmes fail, and why does each new wave of technology (ERP, Industry 4.0, now AI) fail in much the same way?

Its answer is that the fault isn’t in the technology, the leadership or the change plan. It’s in the business model of industry itself. Manufacturers are organised into silos. The suppliers who serve them are organised into the same silos. A complex system gets designed one component at a time, and suppliers are bought sequentially and set against each other. The paper’s answer is collaboration, mandated by the CEO, with the manufacturer and its main solution providers agreeing to a shared mission.

We agree, and we want to say so publicly. We also want to add to it. The paper is written mostly from the top of the supply chain looking in. We’ve spent our careers working from the other end: in SME machine shops, fabricators, electronics assemblers and subcontractors, the tier-2 and tier-3 businesses whose performance decides whether an OEM’s transformation actually shows up in parts delivered on time.

Seen from there, the systemic problem is real. It’s also bigger than the paper describes.

The Diagnosis Matches What We See on the Shop Floor

Dolores has led digital transformation programmes since 1998. Her background is in psychology and AI, and most of that work has been about managing behaviour change as much as technology change. Dorian runs Customer Success and Product & Delivery at TotalControlPro, so he lives with the consequences of every implementation decision long after go-live. Between us, the four parts of Robinson’s systemic problem are familiar ground:

• Internal silos. We see the IT/OT gap at every scale. In a large manufacturer it’s two departments with different budgets. In a 40-person SME it’s often one overstretched person wearing three hats, with the ERP reseller, the machine tool dealer and the IT support firm each giving advice that only makes sense in their own corner.
• External silos. The providers mirror the silos. ERP vendors talk to finance, automation vendors talk to engineering, and the shop floor (where the value is actually made) is left to spreadsheets and whiteboards in the gap between them.
• System complexity. Performance is a property of the whole system, not one part of it. A perfectly configured ERP is no help if nobody knows which job is on which machine right now.
• The engagement model. Point solutions bought one at a time, in isolation, with suppliers who never speak to each other. That’s exactly where the rework, the change requests and the six-month “integration phase” come from.

We’d also strongly support the paper’s point about AI. There’s a lot of value to be had from getting the basics right, and most AI simply can’t work with the quality and structure of data found in most factories today. In our experience, AI is only as useful as the execution data underneath it. If you don’t capture what actually happened at each operation, there’s nothing for it to reason about.

The systemic problem doesn’t stop at the factory gate. It runs straight down the supply chain, and it gets worse at every tier.

From Tier 2 and Below, the Silos Multiply

The paper’s central exercise is a good one. Ask a manufacturer which five external organisations have the most impact on its strategic objectives. For a global OEM the answer might be a strategy house, an ERP vendor, an automation vendor, a hyperscaler and a systems integrator.

Ask the same question of a precision engineering subcontractor in the Midlands and you get a different list:

For most SME suppliers, the organisation with the most impact on their objectives is their customer. The OEM’s schedule stability, payment terms, quality regime, portal requirements and forecast accuracy shape the supplier’s performance more than any software vendor ever will.

That’s where the external silos compound. An SME serving four Primes can end up with four supplier portals, four quality reporting formats, four ways of sending forecasts and four sets of traceability requirements. Each one is reasonable on its own. Together, they’re the reductionist model the paper describes, pushed down one tier, where the supplier has the least resource to absorb it.

Then the OEM runs its own transformation programme, and the results depend on parts arriving from suppliers who were never in the room. If 70% of transformations fail at the top of the chain, a big share of that failure is being inherited from a supply base nobody included in the quorum.

Extending the Quorum Down the Supply Chain

The Quorum Principle™ puts the CEO at the centre: only the CEO can mandate collaboration across silos that would otherwise defend their own territory. We think the same logic applies one level up. Across a supply chain, the OEM or Prime is the CEO-equivalent. It’s the only party with the convening power, the visibility and the commercial weight to get the tiers working as one system rather than a chain of separate transactions.

Here’s what we’d ask OEMs and Primes to commit to as part of a supply-chain quorum:

1. Convene, Don’t Just Cascade

Bring key tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers into the quorum for programmes that depend on them. Give them the mission charter, not just the requirements that flow out of it.

2. Share the Plan Early

Stable forecasts, early demand signals and honest visibility of schedule changes. Most supply-chain firefighting starts with information that existed upstream but never reached the shop floor.

3. Standardise What You Ask For

Agree common data formats and open interfaces with your peers so a supplier can meet traceability and reporting needs once, from its own system, rather than retyping into a different portal per customer.

4. Invest in Supplier Capability

Fund or co-fund supplier development: digital adoption, shop-floor data capture, training. Treat it as part of your own transformation budget, because your results depend on it.

5. Measure the System, Not the Part Price

On-time-in-full across the chain, lead-time stability and quality escapes tell you far more about system performance than the unit price on a purchase order.

6. Share the Gains

When collaboration takes cost and lead time out, share the benefit through fair terms, prompt payment and longer-term agreements. Nobody stays in a quorum where only one party gains.

None of this is charity. It’s the paper’s own argument followed through: performance belongs to the whole system, and in discrete manufacturing the whole system runs from raw material to final assembly, across several companies’ balance sheets.

SMEs Are Natural Early Adopters of the Quorum Principle™

The paper says the adoption life cycle starts with innovators. We’d argue SMEs are well placed to be among them:

• The CEO mandate is quicker. In most SMEs the CEO is the owner, and often the person on the shop floor at 7am. Step 1 of the playbook is one conversation, not a board cycle.
• The scope is naturally contained. The playbook recommends starting with a single line, factory or project. That’s the whole business for many SMEs, which makes the impact easy to see and quick to prove.
• Fewer layers to break through. Silos exist in SMEs, but they’re thinner. Once people can see the same live picture of production, they line up behind it quickly.
• Speed of decision. SMEs can trial, learn and adjust in weeks, which is exactly the evidence the wider movement needs.

What SMEs need in return is a format that fits. More on that below.

Best for Customer, in How We Build and How We Sell

We don’t claim to have been running the Quorum Principle™ before it had a name. But many of its ideas match the way we’ve chosen to build TotalControlPro and DynamxMFG, our cloud-based Manufacturing Execution System for discrete manufacturers. Some examples:

• Alongside, not instead of. DynamxMFG is built to work alongside a customer’s existing ERP or accounts package, not to rip it out. For an SME, it can be the complete operational platform, with Sage, Xero or QuickBooks handling the finance. In a multi-site group, it’s the execution layer under the group ERP. Either way, we’re designing to fit into the customer’s system, not to take territory.
• Open by default. Public REST APIs for customers, sales orders, purchase orders and suppliers, plus integrations including Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot and Make, mean a supplier’s data can flow to its customers and partners without retyping. That’s the technical side of the organisational interoperability the paper calls for.
• Collaborating across the IT/OT line. Our partnership with Omron, which brings DynamxMFG into Omron’s i-BELT smart factory framework, is a practical example of an automation provider and a MES provider choosing to work together for the customer rather than compete for the same budget.
• Working inside prime-led programmes. We’ve delivered DynamxMFG inside a regulated, multi-party nuclear sector programme where a prime, integrators and an SME software provider had to operate as one team. Our session at the Nuclear Manufacturing Summit, From Project to Process, was about exactly that: what it takes for an SME to deliver in a chain like that.
• The basics before the hype. Shop-floor data capture, live tracking of every work order and operation, and accurate job costing come first. Dynamx Assist sits on top of that data, inside the platform, so customers can build dashboards from their own production data by asking in plain English, and the data stays with them.

The evidence from our customers backs up the systemic view. Gloucestershire Machining Centre saw a 40% uplift in capacity with a 2.1-month payback, and CPL / KLUBB Group runs at 99.9% on-time delivery. Neither result came from a single feature. They came from people, machines and orders finally being visible in one connected system.

Five Constructive Challenges

Supporting an idea properly means testing it. These are the points we’d most like to see the Quorum Principle™ community work through, and we’d be glad to help.

1. Make the Supply Chain an Explicit Part of the Playbook

The “five providers” exercise should have a sixth seat by default: key suppliers, for the manufacturer, and key customers, for an SME. Without it, the quorum fixes the boardroom and leaves the supply chain to the old model.

2. Design an SME-Sized Format

A five-day training course is a reasonable ask for a programme team at a large OEM. For a 30-person subcontractor, five days is a week of the MD’s time and a week of lost output. A compressed format, or modules delivered alongside a Prime’s supplier development programme, would open the door far wider.

3. Back Collaboration With Commercial Structure

Mindset change wears off without contracts to match. Gain-share models, open-book arrangements and longer-term supply agreements give people a reason not to “revert to type”, which the paper rightly identifies as the main risk once the coaching stops.

4. Keep Technical Interoperability in the Frame

The paper is right that standards initiatives don’t solve organisational interoperability on their own. For SMEs, though, the reverse is also true. Without open interfaces and common data formats, a supplier can’t afford to collaborate with several customers at once. The two problems need solving together.

5. Let the Argument Stand on the System, Not the Statistic

The 70% failure figure is widely quoted and also widely debated. The case for the Quorum Principle™ is strong enough without leaning on it. Better still, the community could build its own evidence base: trial projects with agreed baseline measures, published openly, including the ones that don’t hit target.

What TotalControlPro Will Do

1. Join quorum teams when our customers ask us to, and work openly alongside their ERP, automation and integration partners toward the customer’s objectives, not our product roadmap.
2. Bring the SME voice into the conversation so the playbook works for the tiers where most manufacturing jobs, and most supply-chain risk, actually sit.
3. Keep our platform open, with published APIs and integrations so suppliers can share live production data with customers and partners without extra admin.
4. Work with OEMs and Primes on a supply-chain quorum pilot: a Prime, a small group of its SME suppliers and their providers, with an agreed mission, shared baseline measures and published results.

The paper ends with Henry Ford: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” For UK supply chains, doing something different means OEMs and Primes using their position to convene rather than just to specify, and SMEs being treated as members of the quorum rather than recipients of its decisions.

We’re in. Who else is?

Talk to Us About a Supply-Chain Quorum

If you’re an OEM or Prime thinking about how to bring your supply base with you, or an SME supplier who wants a seat at the table, we’d like to hear from you.

Book a 15-minute demo or get in touch.

This article responds to The Quorum Principle™: A New Approach to Industrial Transformation by John Robinson. Find out more at thequorumprinciple.com. The Quorum Principle™ Live, The Future of UK Manufacturing, takes place on 8 December 2026 at the Manufacturing Technology Centre, Coventry.