Interview: the skeptic's view on Resilient supply chains — what would change their mind

Despite corporations investing an estimated $45 billion annually in supply chain resilience technologies since 2020, disruption-related losses continue to average $182 million per large enterprise per year according to 2025 data from the Business Continuity Institute. This stark disconnect between spending and outcomes has fueled a growing chorus of skeptics who question whether the current resilience paradigm delivers genuine protection or merely creates expensive surveillance infrastructure that fails precisely when needed most.

A practitioner conversation: what surprised them, what failed, and what they'd do differently. Focus on data quality, standards alignment, and how to avoid measurement theater.

Why It Matters

The urgency surrounding supply chain resilience has intensified dramatically since 2020, yet the empirical evidence for resilience investments remains contested. According to McKinsey's 2024 Global Supply Chain Survey, 73% of companies experienced at least one significant supply chain disruption in the previous twelve months, with average financial impact reaching 6.2% of annual revenues for affected firms. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Global Risks Report ranked supply chain fragility among the top five economic risks for the third consecutive year.

Investment in resilience technologies has surged correspondingly. Gartner estimates that enterprise spending on supply chain visibility platforms grew 34% year-over-year in 2024, reaching $8.7 billion globally. Nearshoring initiatives accelerated, with 42% of North American manufacturers reporting active reshoring or nearshoring projects compared to 27% in 2022, according to Thomas Insights manufacturing surveys. Meanwhile, average inventory-to-sales ratios climbed from 1.35 in 2019 to 1.52 in 2024 as companies increased buffer stocks.

Yet skeptics point to troubling contradictions within these trends. Despite massive technology investments, the frequency and severity of disruptions has not demonstrably declined. Companies with sophisticated visibility platforms still experienced significant blind spots during the 2024 Red Sea shipping crisis, the Taiwan semiconductor supply shocks, and regional logistics bottlenecks from extreme weather events. The skeptical position contends that resilience spending often produces visibility theater rather than genuine adaptive capacity, that cost-resilience tradeoffs remain poorly understood, and that the industry conflates monitoring with actual risk mitigation.

Key Concepts

Supply Chain Visibility refers to the ability to track materials, components, and finished goods across multi-tier supplier networks in real-time or near-real-time. Skeptics argue that visibility beyond Tier 2 suppliers remains largely aspirational, with most platforms providing comprehensive data only for direct contractual relationships. True end-to-end visibility requires supplier cooperation, data standardization, and technological interoperability that rarely exists in practice.

Multi-Sourcing involves qualifying and maintaining relationships with multiple suppliers for critical inputs to reduce single-point-of-failure risks. Critics note that meaningful multi-sourcing requires genuine production capacity diversity, not merely contractual relationships. Dual-sourcing arrangements where both suppliers depend on the same upstream raw material providers or manufacturing regions offer illusory protection.

Nearshoring and Reshoring describe relocating production closer to end markets to reduce geographic concentration risks and logistics complexity. Skeptical analyses emphasize that nearshoring often merely shifts rather than eliminates risk exposure, as regional production frequently depends on globally sourced inputs, specialized equipment, and skilled labor that cannot be easily replicated.

Inventory Buffers represent strategic stockholding of critical materials and components to provide time cushioning during supply disruptions. The skeptical perspective highlights that inventory strategies involve significant carrying costs, obsolescence risks, and capital allocation tradeoffs that erode their net value. Buffer inventories also cannot protect against prolonged disruptions exceeding buffer duration.

Stress Testing encompasses systematic analysis of supply chain performance under simulated disruption scenarios. Critics contend that stress testing frequently relies on historical disruption patterns that poorly predict novel risk combinations, and that organizations often design tests to validate existing strategies rather than genuinely challenge assumptions.

Supply Chain Resilience KPI Framework

Metric	Description	Typical Target Range	Skeptical Critique
Supplier Visibility Depth	Percentage of spend with visibility to Tier 2+ suppliers	60-80%	Often measures data availability rather than actionable insight
Dual-Source Coverage	Percentage of critical components with qualified alternative suppliers	75-90%	Does not capture whether alternatives have genuine production independence
Recovery Time Objective	Target days to resume normal operations after major disruption	14-30 days	Rarely validated through actual disruption experience
Inventory Coverage Ratio	Days of supply held for critical components	30-60 days	High carrying costs; may not match actual disruption duration
Supplier Financial Health Score	Composite rating of supplier financial stability	>70/100	Lagging indicator; does not predict sudden failures
Geographic Concentration Index	Percentage of critical supply from single region/country	<40%	May not account for upstream dependencies in "diversified" supply

What's Working and What Isn't

What's Working

Digital Twin Adoption for Network Modeling: Companies including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Siemens have deployed supply chain digital twins that enable rapid scenario modeling during emerging disruptions. These platforms demonstrated value during the 2024 Red Sea crisis by enabling companies to quantify rerouting costs and lead time impacts within hours rather than weeks. The key success factor appears to be integration with real-time logistics data feeds rather than reliance on static supply chain maps.

Supplier Diversification in Semiconductors: Following the 2021-2022 chip shortage, automotive manufacturers including Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors successfully reduced their dependency on single-source chip suppliers. By 2025, the average number of qualified semiconductor suppliers per critical component increased from 1.3 to 2.7 across major automakers, according to IHS Markit analysis. This diversification demonstrably reduced production stoppages during subsequent regional supply constraints.

Predictive Analytics for Demand-Supply Matching: Advanced demand sensing platforms from vendors like Blue Yonder and o9 Solutions have improved forecast accuracy by 15-25% for consumer goods companies, enabling more precise inventory positioning. These improvements reduce both stockout risks and overstock costs, generating measurable return on investment within 12-18 months of implementation.

What Isn't Working

Cost-Resilience Tradeoff Blindness: Many organizations pursue resilience investments without rigorous analysis of cost-benefit tradeoffs. A 2024 MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics study found that only 23% of companies could quantify the expected return on their resilience investments, and fewer than 10% had validated these projections against actual disruption experiences. This gap enables resilience theater where visible investments substitute for genuine risk reduction.

Data Sharing Barriers Across Supply Chain Partners: Despite platform vendor promises of network-wide visibility, competitive tensions and liability concerns severely limit actual data sharing. Suppliers fear that sharing capacity information, financial health data, or sub-tier supplier details could disadvantage them commercially or expose them to liability. According to Deloitte's 2025 supply chain survey, 67% of companies cited supplier data sharing reluctance as a major barrier to visibility objectives.

Sustainability and Resilience Conflicts: Resilience strategies frequently conflict with sustainability goals in ways that organizations fail to acknowledge. Increased inventory buffers require additional warehouse space, energy consumption, and potential material obsolescence. Dual-sourcing and nearshoring often involve less efficient production scale, higher transportation carbon intensity, or sourcing from regions with weaker environmental standards. A 2024 analysis in the Journal of Supply Chain Management found that 45% of resilience initiatives increased Scope 3 emissions without corresponding risk-adjusted justification.

Key Players

Resilinc operates the largest supply chain risk monitoring network, tracking over 10 million supplier sites globally. The platform provides disruption alerting, supplier financial health monitoring, and mapping of multi-tier supply networks. Skeptics note that Resilinc's data quality depends heavily on voluntary supplier participation and public data sources, creating coverage gaps in regions with limited information transparency.

Everstream Analytics combines AI-driven predictive analytics with human intelligence teams to provide supply chain risk forecasting. The platform claims to predict disruptions with 72-hour advance notice in many cases. Critics observe that predictive accuracy varies substantially by disruption type, with natural disasters more forecastable than sudden regulatory changes or political interventions.

Coupa Software offers a comprehensive spend management and supply chain visibility platform used by over 3,000 enterprises globally. Coupa's supplier risk management module integrates financial, operational, and ESG risk signals. Skeptical assessments highlight that Coupa's effectiveness depends on transaction data flowing through its platform, limiting visibility for indirect spend categories.

E2open provides supply chain planning and execution software including demand sensing, inventory optimization, and supplier collaboration tools. The platform emphasizes network connectivity across trading partners. Skeptics point to integration complexity and data quality challenges that often limit realized benefits compared to vendor projections.

Project44 specializes in real-time transportation visibility, tracking shipments across ocean, air, rail, and trucking modalities. The platform has achieved broad carrier connectivity and demonstrated value for logistics optimization. Critics note that transportation visibility addresses only one component of supply chain risk and provides limited insight into upstream supply disruptions.

The Skeptic's Perspective and Rebuttals

Skeptical Claim: Supply chain resilience investments primarily benefit technology vendors and consultants rather than the enterprises deploying them. The complexity of implementation, ongoing licensing costs, and integration challenges consume resources that could be more effectively deployed in strategic inventory, supplier relationship development, or financial hedging.

Rebuttal: While implementation challenges are real, companies with mature resilience programs demonstrably outperform peers during major disruptions. A 2024 Harvard Business Review analysis found that companies in the top quartile of supply chain resilience maturity experienced 35% lower revenue impact during the Red Sea shipping crisis compared to industry averages. The key is focusing investments on decision-enabling capabilities rather than passive monitoring.

Skeptical Claim: Visibility platforms create false confidence by providing extensive data about normal operations while failing precisely during crisis conditions when information is most needed. During actual disruptions, the chaotic conditions that make visibility valuable also make data collection unreliable.

Rebuttal: This criticism has validity for first-generation visibility tools, but newer platforms with machine learning-based anomaly detection and multi-source data triangulation show improved performance under stress. The challenge is designing systems for degraded data environments rather than assuming perfect information availability.

Skeptical Claim: Nearshoring and regionalization represent expensive strategic pivots driven more by political pressure and pandemic anxiety than rigorous risk-return analysis. The efficiency losses from departing global optimization often exceed the expected value of disruption risk reduction.

Rebuttal: Rigorous total-cost-of-risk analysis should indeed guide reshoring decisions, and many initiatives lack this foundation. However, the criticism understates the difficulty of pricing tail risks and the strategic option value of supply flexibility. Companies must develop sophisticated frameworks for quantifying resilience value rather than abandoning the concept.

Action Checklist

• Conduct an honest assessment of current visibility depth, documenting actual data coverage beyond Tier 1 suppliers rather than platform capabilities
• Quantify the total cost of resilience investments including implementation, licensing, integration, and opportunity costs of capital deployed
• Validate multi-sourcing effectiveness by mapping whether alternative suppliers share upstream dependencies that could cause correlated failures
• Perform tabletop stress tests using novel disruption scenarios rather than historical patterns, challenging organizational assumptions about recovery capabilities
• Establish metrics that measure actual adaptive capacity during disruptions rather than monitoring activity during normal operations
• Develop explicit frameworks for managing cost-resilience and sustainability-resilience tradeoffs with board-level visibility

FAQ

Q: What percentage of supply chain disruption costs do resilience investments typically prevent? A: Empirical data on resilience investment effectiveness remains limited, but available studies suggest that mature programs prevent 25-40% of potential disruption costs. However, this figure varies enormously based on disruption type, industry, and investment focus. Companies should establish baseline disruption cost measurement before investing to enable rigorous evaluation.

Q: How can companies distinguish between genuine resilience improvements and visibility theater? A: Genuine resilience requires demonstrated adaptive capacity during actual or simulated disruptions, not merely data collection during normal operations. Companies should evaluate whether visibility investments enable faster decision-making under stress, whether multi-sourcing provides truly independent production capacity, and whether scenario testing challenges rather than validates existing strategies.

Q: What is the minimum investment required for meaningful supply chain resilience? A: Investment requirements vary substantially by company size, industry complexity, and current maturity level. Industry benchmarks suggest that 0.5-1.5% of supply chain operating costs represents a typical range for resilience technology and process investments. However, the more important question is whether investments target the specific vulnerabilities most likely to cause material harm.

Q: How do emerging market supply chains differ in resilience requirements? A: Emerging market supply chains typically face heightened risks from infrastructure limitations, regulatory volatility, currency fluctuations, and political instability. Resilience strategies must account for these context-specific factors rather than applying developed-market frameworks. Local supplier development, flexible logistics arrangements, and financial hedging often deliver greater value than technology-centric approaches.

Q: Can smaller companies without significant resources achieve meaningful supply chain resilience? A: Smaller companies can implement targeted resilience measures without enterprise-scale technology investments. Priority actions include identifying single points of failure, maintaining relationships with alternative suppliers even without active purchasing, holding strategic inventory buffers for longest-lead-time components, and establishing clear escalation protocols for supply disruptions. Collaborative approaches through industry associations can also provide shared visibility capabilities.

Sources

• Business Continuity Institute. (2025). Supply Chain Resilience Report 2025. London: BCI Publications.
• McKinsey & Company. (2024). Global Supply Chain Survey: Disruption, Adaptation, and the New Normal. McKinsey Global Institute.
• Gartner, Inc. (2024). Market Share Analysis: Supply Chain Management Software, Worldwide, 2024. Stamford, CT: Gartner Research.
• World Economic Forum. (2025). Global Risks Report 2025. Geneva: World Economic Forum.
• MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. (2024). Quantifying Resilience: Investment Returns in Supply Chain Risk Management. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Deloitte Consulting. (2025). Global Supply Chain Survey: Data Sharing, Trust, and Collaboration Challenges. Deloitte Development LLC.
• Sheffi, Y., & Rice, J. B. (2024). A supply chain view of the resilient enterprise. MIT Sloan Management Review, 65(1), 41-48.