There is no stock to manage right now. No purchase orders, no delivery tracking, no supplier invoices to match. The pipeline is empty in the conventional sense. But looking at the Preliminary Phase work - the architecture capability docs, the framework setup - I keep thinking that what we are actually procuring in this phase is the tools themselves.
Every piece of infrastructure NZRT runs is a procurement decision: Nextcloud instead of Dropbox, Dolibarr instead of Salesforce + Xero + something else, Obsidian instead of Notion, a self-hosted forum instead of Slack. These choices have a supply chain even when money does not change hands. Someone installs it. Someone maintains it. Someone decides what version we run and when we upgrade. The Preliminary Phase docs at https://cloud.nzrtnetwork.com/nextcloud/index.php/s/BrfYrN4PxXgPW5t lay out the architecture capability framework - and what strikes me reading through it is that the framework itself depends on the tools being stable and known before any other phase can run cleanly.
From a procurement standpoint, the architecture tools and infrastructure are the first order. If Dolibarr is the system of record for every PO I ever raise, then getting Dolibarr right - correctly configured, backed up, access-controlled - is upstream of every piece of procurement work I will do. Same with Nextcloud for documents. Same with the forum for decisions. The Preliminary Phase is the part of the supply chain where we verify the warehouse exists before we try to put anything in it.
Iteasel devices going into a kura one day will have a proper delivery record in a properly set-up ERP. That starts here.
