Resilience: The New Imperative for Successful Supply Chain Management Transformation

The Resilient Supply Chain

Resilience can mean the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or disruptions to a plan.

In the case of a substance or object, it means elasticity.

When describing supply chains, resilience means both of these and more; for example, recovering from unplanned events such as catastrophic weather events and being elastic enough to strategically manage risks.

Specifically, a resilient supply chain is:

• Versatile and agile to support faster, simpler, and more efficient demand sensing and shaping, as well as able to effectively respond to changing business and market circumstances. The overarching goal is to meet agreed service levels under all circumstances.
• Scalable to ensure efficient business growth, margin retention, and resource reallocation when business needs change.
• Quick to completely recover without waste and cycle time implications following disruption or adversity.
• Unified, and networked with highly integrated software, processes, and data that support end-to-end analytics, execution, collaboration, control, and visibility internally and externally.

Resilience ensures success (and even survival) for supply chains in a business environment characterized by change, complexity, unpredictability, and risk.