The mission
In 2022, the Ministry of Defense of the Kingdom of Netherlands (NLMOD) created a small but special budget for new ideas for public procurement. That was enough for Majid Iqbal and a young team of analysts the opportunity to set up a two-year project, under the name Structural. The mission was to develop a framework for contracts that won't break under economic stress because they are flexible. The foundational premises came from an NLMOD assignment Majid had earlier led, called Design for Procurement, and from a book he has written. The directive principles were mutual understanding, cooperation and trust between customers and suppliers. The project created new insights for the government.
The Structural team was given access to a live procurement project as the test case. It involved a long-term contract for the maintenance and repair of a new fleet of military vehicles. The team took technical requirements, procurement guidelines, and a previous agreement, to demonstrate an approach called mutualisation – a heuristic for reducing unnecessary costs. As part of the exploration, the team developed new concepts, such as creating prospectuses for promises of demand and supply, a balance sheet of promises, and a playbook for negotiations. And although there wasn't enough time or money to develop software, the team wrote a compelling narrative of an AI-powered, would help enterprises predict problems in demand and supply and avoid economic stress.
The intellectual property from project is in the hands of a Dutch legal entity, also called Structural, under the stewardship of Majid, Indy, and Jann. The firm is free to repurpose the knowledge to help other organisations who have the same strategic interest as the Dutch government: strong and flexible relationships with customers and suppliers that will withstand the economic stress in the era of climate change. The underlying ideas and concepts are useful for more than just public procurement and selling to the government. They can be applied in the broader context of enterprises having to realign with new realities, by making careful adjustments to promises of demand and supply. If you're interested in applying this new knowledge within your own context, please contact any one of the three directors listed above.