European manufacturers describe their sourcing difficulty as a cost problem. In interviews across the Industrie desk, the recurring failure is narrower: the qualification file.
A casting or forging arriving at a European plant carries a documentary chain — material certificates under EN 10204, dimensional reports, heat numbers, traceability back to the melt. When that chain is incomplete, the part is functionally unusable regardless of unit price, and the delay is measured in quarters rather than weeks.
The consequence is structural. Buyers concentrate volume on a small number of qualified suppliers because re-qualification is expensive, and concentration is precisely the dependency European industrial policy now argues against. Resilience, in practice, means paying for parallel qualification before it is needed.
What separates resilient programmes from fragile ones is unglamorous: standardised inspection protocols agreed before the first order, metrology capability verified on site rather than by declaration, and a contractual jurisdiction that makes disputes resolvable.