Although the COVID-19 pandemic has delivered the biggest supply chain or value chain shock in recent memory, other examples abound. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to ...

• producers, which make or grow the raw materials for goods
• vendors, which buy and sell materials
• manufacturers, which make materials into goods
• transporters, or logistics providers, which move those goods around the world
• supply chain managers, which ensure tha...

A supply chain includes all the raw materials and parts that are made into a product and distributed up the chain for manufacture and sale. In contrast, a va...

A supply chain is made up of interconnected parts of a whole, all of which add up to finished products bought by customers. Take automobiles, for example. Before a consumer buys a car, iron ore is extracted from the earth. The ore is transported to a plant, where it’s turned into steel, which is ...

Inflation can play a role in supply chain challenges. When inflation occurs, costs for input materials (

Quick responses are easier to accomplish, but if long-term resilience is the goal, the following techniques can help:

• constructing a digital twin of the most critical parts of the supply chain, allowing for simulations and test cases
• creating and testing “what if” scenarios

While some leading organizations have already realized value from digitization, others are lagging behind. Modernizing supply chain IT—for instance, to improve demand forecasting and planning systems—can have a powerful effect. For organizations looking to step up on IT for supply chain planning,...

Organizations often focus on managing the shocks that they see most often. The COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder that while outliers are rare, organizations still need to consider such possibilities when making decisions and strategic moves.

For most organizations, that will mean expanding s...

Incremental efforts aren’t enough to capture the full potential, and drilling down into the right supply chain structure and physical footprints is a critical starting point. 

Midsize supplier plants with 1,000 to 1,500 employees were nearly twice as likely as bigger or smaller counterparts...

• planning and supplier networks
• transportation and logistics systems
• financial resiliency
• product complexity
• organizational maturity

Supply chain disruptions lasting one month or longer occur every 3.7 years, on average. And these disruptions can ha...

Resilience refers to the ability to withstand, adapt, and thrive in the face of internal and external shocks—both known and unknown. More specifically, 

Supply chain management (and operations, more broadly) is now a CEO-level concern. Some of the strategic operational questions that CEOs have on their agenda include the following:

Can we meet customer demand both today and tomorrow?

Should we boost capac...

Firefighting. This refers to short-term, day-to-day actions that can help identify previously overlooked supply chain gaps. These tactics don’t build resilience, however, so they should be used only in concert with more complex, long-term reforms.

Integrating and st...

Few established companies have fully digitized their end-to-end operations. But digitization can be a feasible solution to operational challenges seen across many compa...

Digitization, including advanced analytics, automation, and machine learning, can help operations become more productive, flexible, and geared for speed. Such approaches have yielded real results for some leading organizations—for example, reducing inventory and cost of goods sold by 30 percent, ...