With extensive experience in procurement and supply chain management, Dojo Esquivel, General Manager of Procurement & Supply Chain at Club Assist, plays a critical role in shaping the company’s approach to building resilient and agile supply chains. With a strong focus on collaboration, operational efficiency, and strategic partnerships, Dojo is dedicated to ensuring the company’s procurement processes are not only efficient but also flexible enough to adapt to disruptions in the global supply chain.
In this exclusive interview, Dojo shares insights on how he’s building resilience into supplier relationships at Club Assist. He discusses the importance of structured collaboration, supplier diversity, and the role of key performance indicators (KPIs) and business reviews in mitigating risks. He also highlights how leveraging strong partnerships, rather than transactional relationships, enables Club Assist to navigate challenges and disruptions with agility and confidence. From fostering supplier trust to focusing on operational adaptability, Dojo provides a comprehensive look at how procurement and supply chain strategies are evolving to create long-term value and ensure business continuity.
How do you approach identifying and mitigating risks in your procurement strategy?
I typically focus on product supply risk first. For any business, selling their core product is essential. While this may seem basic, it is also the number one risk to consider. Without a stable and reliable supply chain, even the most well-planned strategies cannot be executed. This makes supply continuity and resilience the first and most fundamental risks I assess in my procurement and category strategies.
To mitigate product supply risks, I focus on supplier diversification, contractual safeguards, inventory and demand planning, supplier relationship management, and risk contingency planning.
My second area of focus is team engagement. As a procurement leader, I want my team to be fully engaged and to believe in the strategic direction we are heading towards. Procurement is not just about securing goods and services; it’s about orchestrating a well-aligned team that believes in and effectively executes the strategy. A highly engaged team ensures that procurement strategies are not only well-conceived but also effectively implemented, reducing internal resistance and improving overall procurement performance.
These two risks are different in nature but integral to a well-executed procurement and supply chain strategy.
What lessons have you learned from past supply chain disruptions?
Reliable partners are critical to your supply chain. It’s not just about the cost of goods (COGS) and services, it’s about the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and having a reliable partner to depend on, especially during periods of disruption. Reliable partners help your business with agility and resilience. In saying that, strong supplier relationships are built and strengthened through trust. How do we build trust? Time and a good track record. Our partner’s capacity to deliver is crucial for businesses that rely on international shipping and the uninterrupted flow of goods.
A reliable team and supply chain partners help us navigate disruptions. While artificial intelligence (AI) and the IoT will play a significant role, it’s people who navigate through disruptions, think outside the box, and execute business continuity planning (BCP).
How do you ensure that your procurement team is prepared to respond to unexpected challenges?
Throughout my career, I’ve learned from previous and current leaders that there is no such thing as overcommunicating. We continue to be in a dynamic environment where data, information, and the insights generated from these are invaluable.
Teams often look to their leader. The best way to prepare your team is to tool up yourself. Continuous self-improvement and learning are key, and connecting with a like-minded network is equally important in preparing us for the future. In this way, continuous learning becomes part of their culture.
Nobody was prepared for COVID and its impact on manufacturing and shipping. We successfully navigated through COVID primarily because of strong collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders. It was definitely a challenge, but one I look back on with pride and lessons learned.
How do you balance risk management with maintaining agility in procurement decisions?
Managing risk and the ability to identify and mitigate it make the organisation agile in the long run. The key to balancing risk and agility is structured flexibility—having well-defined risk controls in place but ensuring they are dynamic enough to allow for rapid decision-making or adjustments. The company that excels in procurement isn’t the one that avoids risk altogether, but the one that understands and navigates it effectively to maintain operational speed and efficiency.
Last year, we encountered a Modern Slavery risk with a potential partner but were able to successfully rectify the situation immediately. We were agile in problem-solving the issue at hand while still achieving the required timelines and meeting customer expectations.
Can you share examples of how you’ve built resilience into your supplier relationships?
In my experience, building resilience requires efficient operations and good practices, such as having key performance indicators (KPIs) and regularly sharing performance updates and programs through business reviews.
Resilience in supplier relationships requires deliberate, structured collaboration, reinforced by operational redundancies, performance-driven accountability, and strategic alignment. The foundation of this resilience lies in clear KPIs, real-time performance tracking, and consistent engagement through structured business reviews and risk assessments.
Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) are forums that are not just about reviewing past performance; they serve as early warning systems, allowing both procurement and suppliers to proactively identify risks, adjust strategies, and optimise processes before disruptions escalate. Without visibility into supplier performance, financial health, and operational risks, procurement is reacting to, rather than preventing, a crisis.
Beyond metrics, supplier diversity is the key to true resilience. A redundancy-based procurement strategy, which ensures multiple sourcing options across geographies, supply chain tiers, and business models, creates built-in adaptability, allowing operations to pivot seamlessly when disruptions occur.
Relying on a single supplier or region is a vulnerability. Instead, leveraging regional alternatives and co-investment opportunities fosters supply chain agility. Diversity in product sourcing is now my focus in our current business strategy.
By cultivating partnerships rather than just transactional relationships, we create an ecosystem where suppliers are invested in our success as much as we are in theirs (win-win), ensuring that when crises arise, we are not negotiating from a position of desperation, but from a position of strength, founded in mutual trust and preparedness.
