Reuters Events | Supply Chain & Logistics Business Intelligence

Highly resilient European companies have been big investors into their processes, workforces and technology stacks, giving them powerful analytical capabilities and the ability to rapidly implement plans across their supply chains

Strategic investment in both workforces and technologies have enabled highly resilient European companies to effectively conduct rapid analysis and implementation of plans across their supply chains leading to them being able to react better to crises and changes in conditions.

These are among the main findings of a new report, ‘The State of European Supply Chains in 2025’ from Reuters: Supply Chain, that surveyed the views of 392 supply chain professionals between 28th January and 28^th February 2025 and is free to download.

Strategic approach yields advantages

Of those organisations surveyed, those that said they could successfully and rapidly adapt their supply chains to changes in conditions demonstrated clear differences in their approach compared to organisations across the broader survey. The report noted that these changes started at the top with strong leadership with a clear strategic direction.

Compared to the rest of the survey, adaptable organisations were noticeably more likely to report that their senior leadership teams are highly keyed into the critical issues within their supply chains. High performers were 15% more likely to say that their boardroom understands supply chain challenges very well and 9% less likely to say that issues are understood poorly, or not well at all. 

Those executive teams are also investing into their workforces. Fifty-two percent of high performers reported adequate skilled IT and data workers and 79% reported clear training protocols for new technologies. This number fell to 37% and 65% across all respondents, respectively.

That strong comprehension in the boardroom and within the workforce then feeds into wider strategic decision making.

Among highly resilient organisations, 72% believed that their investment strategy relating to technology met the needs of their supply chain, compared to 56% in the wider survey.

A technological edge

These advantages in planning, leadership, and skills, translated to more technology deployments and being able to derive more value from their use.

High performers were more likely to find technologies are making their supply chains more resilient in every single technology category Reuters Events, Supply Chain inquired about, with particularly large gaps noted within the Internet of Things (+14%), Application Programming Interfaces (+13%) and cloud computing and 5G (+12%).

Additional technological benefits

The report highlights the capacity of these more resilient organisations to take their ability to gather data, organise and centralise it, and then turn this into impactful decisions within supply chains.

The more resilient organisations were more likely to have deployed control towers (+16%), a single source of truth (+12%) and predictive or prescriptive analytics (+21%).

Resilient firms are leveraging this greater predictive capacity to be more agile by ordering and positioning inventory ahead of potential disruptions. These highly adaptable organisations were more likely to say they could share data and decisions efficiently and use analytics to cut lead times (+13%) and identify disruptions rapidly (+14%).

Further analysis can be found in the free-to-download report, ‘The state of European Supply Chains in 2025 here.