Walk into almost any US plant that's been fighting unplanned downtime for a few years, and you'll find the same root cause more often than not: MRO procurement that was built for convenience, not resilience. It's rarely a single bad decision. It's a slow accumulation of shortcuts — a preferred supplier that never got re-qualified, a spare parts list that hasn't been touched since a machine was commissioned, a purchasing process that treats a $40 bearing the same way it treats a $40,000 gearbox. Maintenance, repair, and operations procurement doesn't get the attention that capital equipment purchasing does. There's no ribbon-cutting for a well-managed spare parts inventory. But talk to any reliability engineer who's had a line down for three days waiting on a part that should have taken three hours to source, and priorities change fast. Why MRO Procurement Gets Treated as an Afterthought Most manufacturing organizations still structure procurement a...