Kieran C. Dunn

Most procurement teams don’t need more people. They need their work to run as a system.

For manufacturers, PE-backed industrials, and supply chain leaders who need senior procurement judgment now, without waiting out a full-time search.

Start a conversation See how I work

Operator → Orchestrator

Over a decade of moving up the same problem.

Every step below taught me something the next one depended on. The through-line is the same question: where is the work being done by people that should be done by a system?

What this looked like

  • Watched a bill of materials turn into a physical product, and learned how far a spreadsheet sits from the line.
  • Saw that most “price” problems are actually specification, tooling, or scheduling problems wearing a price costume.
  • Built the habit that still drives the work: go look at where the part is made before negotiating what it costs.

What this looked like

  • Carried electromechanical direct-material categories: sourcing, negotiation, supplier performance, and cost.
  • Ran should-cost and cost-waterfall models down to raw material, fabrication labour, and freight.
  • Held annual savings accountability rather than a sourcing-event target. The number had to survive into the P&L.

What this looked like

  • Global category ownership of a nine-figure direct-materials and contract-manufacturing portfolio.
  • Consignment and cost-model design: deciding who buys the raw material, who carries it, and how conversion is priced.
  • Supplier governance: QBR cadence, tooling asset control, quality escalation, and exit management.
  • Worked across SAP Ariba, Epicor, NetSuite, and Snowflake rather than around them.

What this looked like

  • Led a contract-manufacturing reshore out of China into Thailand, protecting the revenue that depended on it.
  • Mapped and engineered down Section 301 and IEEPA tariff exposure across a direct-materials portfolio.
  • Qualified new sites, moved tooling, and held continuity of supply through the transition rather than after it.
  • Learned that a reshore is a data problem before it is a logistics problem. You cannot move what you cannot see.

What this looked like

  • Stood up procurement Center of Excellence and PMO structure: method, cadence, and reporting rather than heroics.
  • Replaced recurring arguments with decision policy: thresholds that route a call to procurement and surface only exceptions to leadership.
  • Built the reporting spine that let leadership see status without asking three people for a spreadsheet.

What this looked like

  • Designed agentic workflows over procurement data: goods receipt, part status, and cost inputs feeding a warehouse instead of a mailbox.
  • Built approval-gated automation: the agent prepares and evidences the decision, a human still makes it.
  • Learned the hard constraint of this work: agents fail on weak data foundations long before they fail on reasoning.
  • That constraint is why AI-readiness is a data and process engagement here, not a model engagement.

How I work

Three ways to bring me in.

01

Fractional procurement & supply chain leadership

For manufacturers that need a senior procurement operator now, without adding a permanent head. I own categories, supplier relationships, and cost outcomes the way a direct hire would.

  • Category strategy and negotiation on direct materials
  • Supplier governance, QBRs, and exit management
  • Cost-waterfall and should-cost modelling
02

AI-readiness & data-foundation advisory

For teams that want agents in procurement and keep discovering their data isn’t ready. We fix the foundation first, then automate the work that is genuinely repeatable.

  • Data-readiness assessment across ERP, spend, and supplier records
  • Use-case triage: what should be automated, and what should not
  • Approval-gated agent design with a human decision point
03

Workshops

For leadership teams that already know something is broken and can’t agree on what. A working session that ends with a ranked list your team actually owns.

  • Find the Friction: keynote, podcast, workshop or course
  • Tariff and reshoring exposure working sessions
  • Procurement operating-model reviews

Engagement formats

  • Diagnostic sprint2–4 weeks, fixed scope
  • Ongoing advisoryMonthly, standing cadence
  • Fractional leadershipEmbedded, multi-month

The 2026 file

Five numbers I’d want on the table before signing anything this quarter.

Swipe to see more →

37.5%Aggregate China tariff

After the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, a new Section 301 forced-labor action took effect on 24 July covering 60 economies. China now stacks 12.5% on the existing 25%, and unlike its predecessor it carries no statutory expiry.

Honigman, 24 Jul 2026
Full valueSection 232 basis change

Since 6 April, steel, aluminium and copper duties apply to the entire customs value of an imported product, derivatives included, not just its metal content. If your landed-cost model still splits the value, it is understating duty.

White & Case, 7 Apr 2026
+22.5%Steel mill products, YoY

Producer prices for steel mill products rose every single month of 2026 through July. Unlike memory, this one is still accelerating, and it is the line most annual cost models fixed in January.

BLS via FRED, Aug 2026
$4,473Drewry WCI composite

Container rates roughly doubled between late May and late August. Shanghai–Los Angeles sits at $6,818 per FEU. Anyone who budgeted Q4 landed cost off first-half rates is under-provisioned.

Drewry WCI, 27 Aug 2026
+8.6%Truckload linehaul, YoY

Rates up 8.6% while shipment volumes fell 4.8%. That asymmetry is carrier capacity exiting faster than demand, which is the condition under which contract renewals go badly.

Cass, Jul 2026
CoEWhat I build

A procurement Center of Excellence and PMO: standard method, decision thresholds, and a reporting spine. Leadership stops chasing status and starts seeing only the exceptions, which is the difference between a function that scales and one that hires.

How I work
FTFFind the Friction

My signature session. Where does your team’s time actually go, and which of those places should a system be doing the work instead? Delivered as a keynote, a podcast conversation, an in-house workshop, or a course.

Find the Friction

What I’m watching

The numbers landing on your cost model right now.

54.6ISM Manufacturing PMI, August 2026. An eighth straight month of expansion, down from July’s four-year high of 55.6.
ISM, 1 Sep 2026
23 monthsConsecutive rises in the ISM Prices index, still at 71.1. Input costs have not paused in nearly two years.
ISM, 1 Sep 2026
−21.7%Private manufacturing construction spending, year over year. The factory-building boom is unwinding while the PMI expands.
US Census, 1 Sep 2026
+13–18%Forecast quarter-over-quarter rise in server DRAM contract prices in 3Q26, falling hardest on buyers without long-term agreements.
TrendForce, 9 Jul 2026
  • Over a decade inside a $2B NYSE-listed global manufacturer, plus three years in commercial operations before it.
  • MBA, Information Systems and International Business, University of Connecticut. BS, Villanova University.
  • Hands-on across SAP Ariba, Epicor, NetSuite, Snowflake, and the Microsoft stack.

About

Kieran C. Dunn

I have spent over a decade in manufacturing procurement inside a $2B NYSE-listed global manufacturer, carrying a nine-figure direct-materials and contract-manufacturing portfolio, after three years in commercial operations before that.

The work started on the operations side, close enough to the line to see how a specification becomes a cost. That proximity never left. It is why I still open a cost model before opening a negotiation, and why I distrust savings numbers that cannot be traced to a physical change in how something is made or moved.

The middle of the arc was scale. Global categories, an Asia reshoring program, tariff exposure mapped and engineered down through Section 301 and IEEPA work, and a savings line that had to survive into the P&L rather than into a slide. Then a Center of Excellence and PMO, where the job stopped being my own results and became everyone else’s method.

That is where the current work began. Running a category at scale, you notice how much senior judgment is spent on retrieval: pulling reports, reconciling spreadsheets, chasing status. So I started building systems to carry that load: agentic workflows over procurement data, with a human still making the decision. Operator to orchestrator. It is the same job, done at a different altitude.

I take on a small number of engagements at a time, so that each one gets an operator’s attention rather than an advisor’s.

Let’s find out whether this is a fit.

Tell me what you’re working on. If I’m not the right person, I will say so and point you somewhere better.

Start a conversation