2-minute read · John Foley · Data as of October 16, 2026

The Part Only One Supplier Makes

Deliveries are still getting longer. Here's what that means for the parts you can only buy from one place.

Factories got busier in September. In the New York and Philadelphia Fed surveys, their suppliers got slower in October. If a part on your bill of materials comes from exactly one supplier, that gap is where your risk sits.

Why It Matters

Plants are busier. US manufacturing output rose 0.3% in September. A supplier serving you and five other busy customers has to decide who gets the next batch.

Deliveries are still getting longer. In New York the delivery-times index was 19.8 and supply availability fell to -15.1. Philadelphia's drop to 8.5 is easy to misread: above zero still means more firms saw longer deliveries than shorter ones.

Prices are still rising. Prices paid were 59.5 in New York and 43.2 in Philadelphia, where no firm reported lower prices. A single-source supplier has the most room to pass that on.

Across the Value Chain

• Design: a drawing that names one manufacturer's part locks in a single source before Procurement sees it.
• Plan: planning systems often carry a quoted lead time nobody has checked against real deliveries.
• Source & Procure: a second source takes time; in defense and aerospace it can mean customer approval and first-article inspection.
• Make: one late part can stop a line that has every other part on hand.
• Fulfill: ship dates rest on the slowest single-source part in the build.
• Service: spare parts often come from the same single source, so a shortage hits installed customers too.

What I'd Do This Week

1. Pull your top 20 parts by revenue at risk and flag which are single- or sole-source.
2. For each flagged part, compare the lead time in your planning system with the supplier's last three actual deliveries.
3. Ask each single-source supplier for its current lead time and its own sub-tier constraints.
4. Check whether each contract has a price escalation clause, and which index it is tied to.
5. Pick one part and write down what qualifying a second source would take.

The Bottom Line

Busier plants, slower suppliers and rising input prices hit the parts you can only buy from one place first. You can't change the survey numbers, but you can know exactly which of your parts they apply to.

Which part on your bill of materials has only one supplier? Reply and tell me. It comes straight to me.

John Foley
Former Air Force lieutenant colonel · Foley Strategic Advisory

Sources

1. Federal Reserve Board, "G.17 Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization," September 2026 data, released October 16, 2026. federalreserve.gov
2. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, "Empire State Manufacturing Survey," October 2026, released October 15, 2026. newyorkfed.org
3. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, "Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey," October 2026, released October 15, 2026. philadelphiafed.org