Interview: practitioners on resilient supply chains

In 2024, 80–90% of global organizations experienced at least one significant supply chain disruption, with the average company losing 8% of annual revenue to these events (BCI Supply Chain Resilience Report, 2024). Perhaps more striking, Resilinc documented a 30% increase in supply chain disruptions during the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023—totaling over 10,600 discrete incidents. For procurement professionals navigating this landscape, resilience has evolved from an abstract risk management concept to an urgent operational imperative. This article synthesizes practitioner perspectives on what actually works, what consistently fails, and the hidden trade-offs that rarely appear in vendor presentations.

Why It Matters

The financial stakes of supply chain fragility have become impossible to ignore. McKinsey estimates that a single prolonged disruption can erode 30–50% of one year's EBITDA, while cumulative disruptions over a decade may consume up to 45% of annual profits. The 2024 Red Sea shipping crisis alone cost global trade approximately $6 billion weekly, while the CrowdStrike IT outage inflicted over $5 billion in direct losses on Fortune 500 companies.

Beyond immediate financial impacts, supply chain resilience intersects critically with sustainability objectives. The BCI report found that extreme weather events increased 130% year-over-year in 2024, with flooding incidents rising 220% and forest fires up 48%. Organizations pursuing net-zero commitments cannot decouple emissions reduction from supply chain architecture—Scope 3 emissions, which typically represent 70–90% of a company's carbon footprint, are fundamentally shaped by supplier networks, logistics routing, and procurement decisions.

For procurement teams specifically, these dynamics create a fundamental tension: optimizing for cost efficiency through lean inventory and single-source suppliers directly conflicts with resilience requirements for redundancy and geographic diversification. Practitioners report that navigating this trade-off requires moving beyond traditional procurement metrics toward a more sophisticated understanding of total risk-adjusted cost of ownership.

Key Concepts

Multi-Tier Visibility

Multi-tier visibility refers to an organization's ability to map, monitor, and manage suppliers beyond the first tier. While most companies maintain reasonable oversight of direct suppliers, visibility degrades rapidly at Tier 2 and beyond. The 2024 BCI survey found that only 6% of organizations have achieved full end-to-end supply chain visibility, while 43% lack adequate visibility even into their immediate Tier 1 suppliers.

Practitioners emphasize that visibility is not synonymous with data collection. Effective multi-tier visibility requires data normalization across disparate systems, real-time event monitoring capabilities, and—critically—actionable intelligence that connects upstream disruptions to downstream operational impacts.

Supply Chain Risk Quantification

Traditional approaches to supply chain risk often rely on qualitative assessments and heat maps that fail to translate into meaningful financial terms. Advanced practitioners are adopting probabilistic risk modeling that quantifies exposure in terms of revenue-at-risk, margin impact, and recovery time objectives. This shift enables more sophisticated capital allocation decisions, including ROI calculations for resilience investments that previously appeared as pure cost centers.

Geographic Diversification Strategies

The post-pandemic era has witnessed significant evolution in geographic sourcing strategies. Friend-shoring—preferentially sourcing from political and economic allies—has been adopted by 83% of companies according to Capgemini's 2024 research. Regional diversification investments are underway at 71% of organizations, while 33% are actively pursuing nearshoring or onshoring initiatives.

However, practitioners caution that geographic diversification carries its own costs and complexities. Fragmenting production across multiple regions may increase transportation emissions, complicate quality control, and require duplicative capital investments in tooling and inventory.

Sector-Specific KPI Benchmarks

KPI Category	Metric	Laggard (<25th percentile)	Average (25th–75th)	Leader (>75th percentile)
Visibility	Multi-tier supplier mapping depth	Tier 1 only	Tier 1–2	Tier 1–4+
Response Time	Mean time to detect disruption	>72 hours	24–72 hours	<24 hours
Recovery	Time to operational recovery	>30 days	14–30 days	<14 days
Redundancy	Dual-source ratio (critical components)	<20%	20–50%	>50%
Financial	Revenue-at-risk quantified	None	Partial (top 20 suppliers)	Comprehensive
Compliance	ESG supplier audit coverage	<25%	25–60%	>60%

What's Working

AI-Powered Predictive Analytics

Organizations investing in AI and machine learning for supply chain management report measurable improvements in disruption detection and response. Leading platforms now integrate satellite imagery, shipping data, financial signals, and news feeds to provide early warning of potential disruptions—often days or weeks before they manifest as delivery failures. Practitioners cite lead time forecasting improvements of 15–25% and inventory optimization savings of 10–15% as realistic benchmarks for mature implementations.

Strategic Inventory Buffers

The just-in-time orthodoxy has given way to more nuanced inventory strategies. Forty-five percent of companies surveyed by McKinsey in 2025 have increased inventory buffers specifically as a tariff countermeasure, while 39% have implemented dual-sourcing strategies for critical components. Practitioners report that the key insight is selectivity: applying buffer inventory strategically to high-criticality, high-volatility components rather than blanket inventory increases that simply shift capital from one risk category to another.

Supply Chain Insurance Expansion

Insurance uptake for supply chain risks jumped from 37.4% in 2023 to 46.7% in 2024—a 9.3 percentage point increase in a single year. This reflects both improved product offerings from insurers and growing recognition that residual risk, even after mitigation investments, warrants financial protection. Practitioners emphasize that insurance should complement, not substitute for, operational resilience measures.

Cross-Functional Resilience Governance

Organizations achieving measurable resilience improvements typically share a common characteristic: cross-functional governance structures that elevate supply chain risk to executive-level visibility. Gartner projects that by 2025, over 50% of technology leaders will report directly to Chief Supply Chain Officers, reflecting the convergence of digital capabilities and supply chain operations.

What's Not Working

Blockchain Visibility Platforms

Despite substantial investment, blockchain-based supply chain visibility platforms have struggled to achieve commercial viability. The most prominent example, TradeLens—a joint venture between Maersk and IBM—was discontinued in early 2023 after failing to reach critical mass adoption. Practitioners cite three recurring failure modes: competitors' reluctance to share data on platforms perceived as owned by rivals, unclear value propositions for data providers, and governance concerns around centralized control despite "open platform" branding.

The lesson is not that distributed ledger technology lacks utility, but that technology adoption in supply chains requires genuine industry-wide collaboration and neutral governance structures that technology alone cannot create.

Comprehensive Resilience Strategies

Perhaps counterintuitively, the proportion of companies with comprehensive resilience strategies has declined. According to BCG's 2025 research, only 5% of companies now maintain comprehensive resilience strategies—down from higher levels in 2024—while 68% have retreated to targeting individual initiatives. This fragmentation reflects budgetary pressures: only 4% of companies plan to increase resilience budgets, while one-third expect reductions.

Talent and Digital Maturity Gaps

The supply chain talent shortage continues to constrain resilience initiatives. Ninety percent of supply chain leaders report insufficient talent for digital transformation, creating a bottleneck that technology investments alone cannot resolve. Organizations report that analytics platforms generate insights that existing teams lack the capacity to act upon, while visibility tools expose risks without corresponding capabilities to mitigate them.

Compliance Readiness

Despite growing regulatory requirements around supply chain due diligence—including ESG disclosures, human rights compliance, and conflict minerals reporting—only 9% of organizations report full compliance readiness. Thirty percent acknowledge being significantly or moderately behind on new regulations. Practitioners note that compliance investments often compete with resilience investments for limited budgets, creating a prioritization challenge with no easy resolution.

Key Players

Established Leaders

SAP (Germany): SAP's Integrated Business Planning and Ariba procurement platforms serve as the backbone for supply chain operations at thousands of global enterprises. Their 2024 investments in AI-powered risk sensing and scenario planning have positioned the company as a leader in enterprise-grade resilience capabilities.

Oracle (United States): Oracle's Supply Chain Management Cloud offers end-to-end visibility and planning capabilities, with particular strength in manufacturing-intensive industries. Their acquisition strategy has expanded capabilities in logistics optimization and demand sensing.

Coupa Software (United States): Specializing in business spend management, Coupa's platform provides procurement analytics and supplier risk management that integrates financial and operational risk signals.

Kinaxis (Canada): Kinaxis RapidResponse has become the platform of choice for concurrent planning and scenario modeling, enabling organizations to simulate disruption impacts and response strategies before events occur.

project44 (United States): A leading real-time visibility platform, project44 tracks shipments across carriers and modes, providing the data foundation for supply chain control towers and exception management.

Emerging Startups

Resilinc (United States): Resilinc has emerged as a specialized supply chain risk management platform, offering multi-tier supplier mapping, real-time event monitoring, and impact assessment. Their EventWatchAI platform documented over 10,600 disruptions in H1 2024.

Altana AI (United States): Using machine learning to map global trade networks, Altana provides supply chain visibility that extends beyond traditional data sources to include customs records, shipping manifests, and corporate ownership structures.

Verusen (United States): Focused on MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) supply chains, Verusen applies AI to inventory optimization in industrial settings, addressing a frequently overlooked source of supply chain inefficiency.

Everstream Analytics (United States): Combining AI with human analyst expertise, Everstream provides predictive risk intelligence that identifies emerging threats before they impact operations.

Sourcemap (United States): Specializing in supply chain transparency and sustainability compliance, Sourcemap helps organizations trace products to their origins and verify supplier sustainability credentials.

Key Investors and Funders

Insight Partners: One of the most active investors in supply chain technology, with portfolio companies spanning visibility, procurement, and logistics.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z): Has made significant investments in logistics automation and supply chain AI, including autonomous trucking and warehouse robotics.

USDA Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program: Awarded $270 million in 2024 to strengthen food supply chain resilience across U.S. states, representing significant public sector investment in supply chain infrastructure.

U.S. CHIPS Act: Semiconductor supply chain investments totaling billions through awards to Intel, Hemlock Semiconductor, and others to reduce critical technology dependencies.

Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund: A $1.5 billion federal program supporting Open RAN and 5G supply chain resilience through technology diversification.

Examples

Unilever's Partner with Purpose Program: Unilever has implemented a comprehensive supplier engagement program that integrates resilience and sustainability objectives. The program provides financing, training, and technical assistance to suppliers implementing environmental and social improvements. By 2024, the program had reached over 2,000 suppliers globally, with participating suppliers demonstrating 15–20% lower disruption rates compared to non-participants. The approach illustrates that supplier development investments can simultaneously advance sustainability and resilience objectives.
Walmart's Emergency Management Supply Chain: Walmart has developed one of the most sophisticated emergency response supply chain capabilities in retail. Their system pre-positions inventory based on predictive weather modeling, maintains relationships with backup suppliers who can be activated within 24 hours, and operates a dedicated emergency operations center that coordinates response across logistics and store operations. During Hurricane Ida in 2021, Walmart restored 98% of affected store operations within five days—a benchmark for resilience in retail operations.
Toyota's Post-Fukushima Supply Chain Redesign: Following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Toyota undertook a comprehensive supply chain resilience program that has become a reference case for the automotive industry. Key elements included standardizing components across models to enable supplier substitution, requiring critical suppliers to maintain geographically diversified production, and establishing a supply chain database that maps dependencies to the fourth tier. While increasing costs by an estimated 2–3%, the program has prevented multiple potential disruptions and reduced mean recovery time from disruptions by approximately 40%.

Action Checklist

Conduct a multi-tier supplier mapping exercise for your top 20 critical components, extending visibility to at least Tier 3 suppliers and documenting single-source dependencies
Implement a supply chain risk quantification methodology that translates disruption scenarios into revenue-at-risk and margin impact terms
Establish dual-source or backup supplier relationships for components where single-source concentration exceeds acceptable risk thresholds
Deploy real-time monitoring for leading indicators of supplier distress, including financial signals, news events, and operational metrics
Develop cross-functional governance structures that elevate supply chain risk to executive-level visibility and enable rapid response authorization
Evaluate strategic inventory buffers for high-criticality, high-volatility components, balancing working capital costs against disruption risk
Assess supply chain insurance options to transfer residual risk that cannot be economically mitigated through operational measures

FAQ

Q: How do we balance cost efficiency with resilience investments when budgets are constrained? A: The key is risk-adjusted prioritization. Not all supply chain nodes require equal resilience investment. Focus intensive efforts on truly critical components—those where disruption would halt production or significantly impact revenue—while accepting higher risk tolerance for less critical categories. Practitioners report that targeted resilience investments in the top 5–10% of components by criticality can address 60–80% of revenue-at-risk while containing costs. Additionally, frame resilience investments in terms of avoided losses rather than incremental costs; a $1M investment that prevents a $10M disruption delivers clear ROI.

Q: What leading indicators can predict supplier distress before it becomes a delivery failure? A: Effective early warning systems integrate multiple signal categories: financial indicators (credit rating changes, payment pattern shifts, public filings), operational signals (quality excursions, lead time variability, workforce changes), external events (weather, geopolitical developments, regulatory actions), and network effects (disruptions at the supplier's own suppliers). AI platforms can correlate these signals to identify emerging risks 2–4 weeks before they manifest as delivery failures. However, practitioners emphasize that technology must be coupled with response protocols—early warning without response capability simply provides advance notice of inevitable disruption.

Q: How should organizations approach the tension between Scope 3 emissions reduction and supply chain resilience? A: This tension is real but often overstated. Many resilience strategies are emissions-neutral or even beneficial: supplier diversification can reduce transport distances, inventory optimization reduces waste, and supplier development programs can simultaneously address sustainability and operational performance. The genuine trade-offs arise with geographic redundancy (which may increase transport emissions) and buffer inventory (which embeds emissions in potentially unused stock). Leading practitioners address this by incorporating emissions into total cost models, ensuring that resilience decisions account for carbon costs alongside traditional financial metrics.

Q: What governance structures are most effective for supply chain resilience? A: Practitioners consistently cite cross-functional integration as the critical success factor. Effective governance structures typically include: a dedicated supply chain risk function with direct executive reporting, cross-functional crisis response teams with pre-authorized decision rights, regular scenario exercises that test response protocols, and integration of supply chain risk into enterprise risk management frameworks. The specific organizational structure matters less than ensuring that supply chain risk has executive visibility and that response decisions can be made rapidly without excessive approval chains.

Q: How do we evaluate the maturity of our supply chain resilience capabilities relative to peers? A: Start with the KPI benchmarks provided above, assessing your organization's position on visibility depth, response times, redundancy ratios, and compliance coverage. Industry associations and consulting firms publish periodic benchmarking studies that provide sector-specific comparisons. However, practitioners caution against treating benchmarking as the end goal—the objective is not to match peer performance but to achieve resilience levels appropriate to your specific risk exposure and strategic priorities. A company with concentrated customer relationships or high-value, low-volume products may require resilience capabilities well beyond industry averages.

Sources

BCI Supply Chain Resilience Report 2024 — Business Continuity Institute analysis of disruption trends and organizational response capabilities across global enterprises
McKinsey Supply Chain Risk Pulse Survey 2025 — Executive survey on tariff impacts, resilience investments, and strategic priorities for supply chain leaders
Resilinc EventWatchAI Platform H1 2024 Analysis — Quantitative analysis of documented supply chain disruptions including categorization by cause and regional impact
Capgemini Research Institute Supply Chain Survey 2024 — Research on supplier diversification strategies, friend-shoring adoption, and regional sourcing trends
BCG "Balancing Cost and Resilience: The New Supply Chain Challenge" 2025 — Strategic analysis of budget constraints and prioritization approaches for resilience investments
IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 — Analysis of cybersecurity impacts on supply chain operations including financial quantification and recovery timelines
OECD "Keys to Resilient Supply Chains" Brochure 2024 — Policy framework and best practices for building supply chain resilience at national and enterprise levels