I trained to design machines. I ended up buying them.
Four years of mechanical engineering in Odisha: drawings, tolerances, materials, and how a thing is actually put together. In all that time nobody mentioned that every part of every machine has to be specified, sourced, argued over and bought by somebody, or that this was a job you could have.
I found that out on a shop floor.
August 2017, Freudenberg, Pune. Outbound shipments, stock audits, chasing discrepancies. Not glamorous. But a shop floor teaches you the thing most procurement people learn a decade too late: a purchase order is not finished when it is signed. It is finished when the correct object is standing in the right place, on the right day, and somebody has checked that it is correct.
I stayed six years and worked up through it. Material planning, S&OP and master scheduling, APQP and PPAP with suppliers, transport strategy, and the launches where a specification changes on a Friday and production starts on Monday.
The automotive division was three people. I was the third. Which meant my manager and I sat in every department there was, and I ran projects end to end because there was nobody else to run them. Three went the full cycle, design to delivery: a PM2.5 cabin filter, a tractor filtration programme, and a hydrogen fuel-cell filter built with the German team.
By 2023 I could see the ceiling. So I did the uncomfortable thing.
I quit, moved to France, and went back to being a student. An MSc in Global Supply Chain Management and Procurement at SKEMA, with MIT-partnered coursework in analytics and SQL.
I chose France partly for the school. And partly because the factories I wanted to be inside were on that side of the map, and I was tired of writing to them from the outside.
I did not speak the language. I took an internship at illycaffè in Paris and spent five months cleaning 450 supplier records and 4,500 product references. It was a nightmare. It also taught me more about master data than any course has.
In October 2025 I joined AESC’s gigafactory in Douai, buying the technical spares and production equipment that keep five battery lines running. In six months I delivered the highest savings on the purchasing team. Then I built the tool that tracks it, because the ERP could not.
The hardest version of this job buys objects that do not exist yet, from a continent of suppliers, under rules that have to survive scrutiny, for machines that cannot wait. That is the hardest version of the job I already do.
Fourteen years ago I learned how a machine is drawn.
I would like to spend the next fourteen making sure it arrives.
