About the Client
A U.S.-based chemical manufacturer developing specialty polymers for automotive and electronics customers asked Nexus for help. They were planning to switch from lab-scale production to a new third-party toll manufacturer and needed on-the-ground insight to pick the right partner, understand scale-up risks, and avoid costly surprises during commercialization.
The Challenge
Hidden technical & operational risks
Lab performance didn’t guarantee stable output at scale, issues like batch variability, impurity profiles, and yield degradation often only show up in real plants.
Supplier claims vs reality
Several potential toll manufacturers looked good on paper, but the client couldn’t verify capabilities, turnaround, or true cost-to-qualify without heavy onsite due diligence.
Regulatory and downstream risk
The product would supply regulated end-markets; the client needed to understand compliance, documentation, and long lead times for qualification with OEM customers.
Our Approach
Targeted screening & shortlist
We screened ~35 candidates and built a curated panel of 22 experts: plant managers at toll manufacturers, former QA/R&D leads in specialty polymers, procurement heads, regulatory affairs consultants, and third-party lab analysts.
Structured interview guide
Working with the client, we designed a short, repeatable discussion flow covering process reproducibility, typical yield loss drivers, common scale-up workarounds, supplier reliability, lead times for audits, and typical hidden costs.
Technical cross-checks
For top suppliers, we ran follow-up calls with former customers and independent lab contacts to validate claims on impurity control and batch-to-batch consistency.
Benchmarking & synthesis
We benchmarked supplier performance (onboarding time, qualification steps, typical CAPEX pass-throughs) and produced a simple risk-heatmap and a supplier readiness checklist the client could use immediately in negotiations.
Results & Impact
Delivered in a 16-day engagement, the work gave the client practical, decision-ready intelligence:
- 18 in-depth expert interviews completed and full transcripts delivered.
- Shortlisted 3 suppliers (down from 6) with clear trade-offs documented for speed, quality, and cost.
- Identified two critical scale-up risks (process impurity control and a common packaging change that triggers OEM requalification) that the client built into their contract terms and testing plan.
- Negotiation leverage & cost avoidance: using our supplier-readiness checklist, the client renegotiated onboarding milestones and shaved an estimated $900K from early-stage qualification and inventory buffer costs.
- Faster, safer go-live: the client set a phased scale-up plan with acceptance gates informed by our findings, reducing projected time-to-first-sale risk and improving board confidence to move forward.
The client described the work as “focused, technically grounded, and exactly the level of detail we needed,” and now uses Nexus for supplier validation and scale-up checks whenever they move a chemistry from lab to plant.
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