30% procurement savings. Extended lifecycle. -20% CO2 on the category.

The Challenge

After the war in Ukraine kicked off, lead times and prices on antenna infrastructure procurement (pylons, rooftop installations for telecom antennas) became a real problem. The CPO's initial brief was classic: bring prices down, secure supply. Digging into it with the teams, we saw something else. A much bigger opportunity.

What I Found

Products were custom-designed for every site, with no valid technical reason, and with specs that made them impossible to reuse or even to repair. If a site had to move, the old infrastructure was scrapped and a new one was built from scratch.

40%+ of the spend in the targeted categories was on equipment that could be repaired, refurbished or dismantled for components. The cost delta between new and refurbished, at equivalent quality and SLA, sat between 70% and 90% depending on the sub-category. The supplier ecosystem existed, but it was not ready for that shift in model. Nobody had ever asked them, and they had no view of the central activity.

The process was fully outsourced: no control over the chain, only a cost. And suppliers reinvented the wheel on every project, and made us pay for it every time.

The Approach

Infrastructure standardisation. Built a set of standard references able to cover 95%+ of field needs. End of "custom per site" as the default. Exceptions now have to be documented and justified, not the other way around.

Partner identification. National RfI and on-site meetings to assess each player's skills and project appetite. Mapping of the key suppliers able to help us define the standards and then mass-produce them.

Zoom on one concrete challenge. All historical data existed as PDFs. We had to dig through every past plan to extract infrastructure dimensions and define a standard that actually matched field reality. That step took several months with dedicated manual workforce. A perfect use case for an LLM today.

Eco-design embedded. Every standard reference was redesigned: less material, less waste, more environmentally-friendly inputs, and most importantly, products engineered from the start to be REPAIRABLE and REUSABLE. Eco-design is not a bolt-on. It is in the spec.

Process brought back in-house. Control of the chain regained, end of opaque sub-contracting. End-to-end visibility on lead times and costs.

Real economies of scale. Instead of running project by project, steering at national level across 2,000+ projects a year. Volume becomes a lever for negotiation and standardisation, not a simple sum of jobsites.

Reverse logistics annexes in framework contracts. Takeback clauses, refurbishment commitments, SLAs on repair service. Incumbents had to align. Three new refurbishment specialists joined the panel.

TCO recalibration. Full lifecycle, residual value, end-of-life cost. TCO now integrates end-of-life value, which radically shifts new-vs-refurbished arbitration. Quarterly procurement and sustainability committee to handle edge cases. No dogma: the rule is to document the decision, not to force an option.