Rachel N Dunbar

Rachel N. Dunbar has spent the last several years doing something most companies desperately need and almost no one wants to fund: building procurement infrastructure from scratch. Supplier scorecards, vendor governance frameworks, cost reduction dashboards, QBR processes, organizational alignment. The unglamorous stuff that quietly holds everything together. She has done it across manufacturing, data center infrastructure, MedTech, and aerospace at companies including Schneider Electric (via Motivair), Fictiv, Fast Radius, and Xometry. The org chart rarely credits her. The results always do.

She is a Strategic Sourcing and Procurement Leader, a negotiation professional, and a woman who has sat across the table from enough difficult suppliers to know that most procurement problems are actually communication problems wearing a spreadsheet as a disguise.

On a personal note, Rachel recently achieved what every parent secretly counts down to: all three of her children are grown, launched, and officially someone else's problem. She is an empty nester and she is not sad about it. Not even a little.

What she is, is free. Free to write. Free to consult. Free to coach. Free to do the work she has always believed in, which is helping companies stop treating their customer and vendor relationships like transactions and start treating them like the strategic assets they actually are.

She is also writing a memoir, because apparently building procurement systems from the ground up was not ambitious enough. It centers on her mother, a woman who shaped her in ways she is still unpacking, and probably will be for the rest of her life.

Rachel's philosophy on life is simple, if a little inconvenient: there is no lasting glory without struggle. You do not get to skip the hard part. She encourages people to get comfortable being alone with themselves, to stop outsourcing their confidence to other people, and to remember that disappointment is just a sign you were depending on someone else to carry what was always yours to carry. Fly alone. Strive alone. The people who figure that out early tend to go the furthest.

She writes about procurement, supply chain leadership, and the gap between what the org chart says and what the supplier data reveals.

Open to Strategic Sourcing, Category Management, and Procurement Leadership opportunities in manufacturing, data center infrastructure, MedTech, robotics and aerospace.