Super Dordi Hydroelectric Project

Super Dordi is a 54.6 MW run-of-river hydropower scheme in Lamjung, built by Bajra Guru Construction Company for People’s Hydro Power Limited. I ran procurement for the construction package.

Hydropower work concentrates every hard problem in procurement into one site. The location is remote, so a material that is not on site is not arriving this afternoon. The specification is unforgiving, because the structures are permanent and load-bearing. And the programme runs long enough that cash and credit — not availability — become the binding constraint.

The brief

The client’s requirement was the one every construction client states and few get in full: quality materials, at the best price the market will actually give, on site when the programme calls for them. Those three pull against each other. The work of procurement is deciding, purchase by purchase, where to hold firm and where there is genuine room.

I worked from comparative market analysis rather than a fixed supplier list — tracking prevailing rates for the materials in active use, so that every negotiation started from a defensible number rather than a quoted one.

The challenge

The real difficulty on Super Dordi was not sourcing. It was credit.

A project of this size buys materials on supplier credit, and a long build cycle stretches every payment term past what a vendor is naturally comfortable with. Suppliers who are content to extend thirty days to a contractor they can see become noticeably less comfortable when the site is hours away and the programme runs for months. Lose a credit line mid-programme and the problem stops being financial and becomes a works stoppage.

What I did

I structured the supplier relationships around security cheques. A vendor extending credit against a concrete instrument is in a materially different position from one extending it against goodwill, and it changed what terms were available to us — vendors who would not have carried the exposure otherwise were willing to, because the guarantee was real and documented.

Alongside that, weekly stock reporting kept consumption visible against what had been ordered. Knowing what was actually being drawn down is what makes it possible to order early enough to protect the programme without tying up cash in material sitting on site.

The result

Supply held across the construction programme and the credit relationships held with it. The vendor base stayed intact through to completion — which, on a remote long-cycle project, is the outcome that matters most.