I’ve sat through a lot of supply chain presentations over the years. Most follow a predictable structure. A few statistics, a description of growing complexity, and a solution framed around that. You get used to filtering and seeing your fellow audience members stay reverentially poised over their smartphones.
When operators speak about real world experience, it’s different. I saw that in our session with Belden at Gartner Supply Chain Symposium on May 20.
Kamal Ahluwalia, our CEO, was on stage with Shakeel Ahmed, Procurement Excellence Lead at Belden. What Shakeel shared was not a conceptual transformation story. It was a detailed walkthrough of how his team changed the way decisions are made. No wonder he got the CEO innovation award for procurement excellence.
For us at Resilinc, our mission statement centers on strengthening the supply chains that power our daily lives. Hearing a customer speak about how they are partnering with us to make that a reality in their business was very powerful. For those of you that weren’t in the room, I’d like to capture what it was like hearing from Shakeel.
Where Belden started
Shakeel described Belden in simple terms.
Sixteen business entities operating globally. Around 1,700 Tier 1 suppliers. Over $1 billion in spend.
The challenge was not identifying risk in general terms. It was linking events to actual business impact. When something happened, the consistent question from leadership was straightforward: what does this mean for revenue?
That answer was not readily available. Data lived in different systems. Visibility largely stopped at Tier 1. Teams had to pull information together manually across locations and functions, often taking days. At that point, speed becomes the constraint.
What changed the approach
The Nexperia situation in 2022 was one example Shakeel pointed to: an issue that sat several layers down the supply chain; not at the Tier 1 level most teams operate in day to day.
The difficulty was not reacting to the event itself. It was understanding exposure quickly enough to act with confidence.
- Which products are impacted
- Which suppliers are linked
- What revenue is at risk
That is where the gap was most visible.
Making risk actionable
One of the more important shifts Shakeel described is how his team now thinks about risk. Instead of tracking events in isolation, the focus is on connecting three things:
- Spend
- Revenue exposure
- Supplier risk
Those inputs feed into a model that allows his team to make decisions in a more consistent way.
He walked through the supplier decision intelligence model they built on top of this data. Each supplier is assigned a composite score based on:
- Spend weighting
- Revenue at risk
- Resiliency score
That score determines how the supplier is classified, whether they are strategic, preferred, approved, or transactional, and how the team engages. This is not static. As data changes, the classification changes with it.
The important point is that the model replaces assumptions with something measurable. Commodity managers are no longer relying on judgment alone to determine how critical a supplier is. They can explain it using data.
Connecting to established models
What also stood out is how this fits into existing procurement frameworks.
Belden is not replacing tools like Kraljic or supplier pyramids. They are feeding them with better data. Risk, spend, and revenue exposure now drive those classifications dynamically.
That allows teams to answer basic questions more clearly:
- Why is this commodity strategic?
- Where are we exposed?
- Which suppliers require deeper engagement?
The output is not another report. It is a clearer basis for decision-making.
What the day-to-day looks like
Shakeel described his day in practical terms.
He logs into the platform and looks at events, with a particular focus on strategic commodities like electronics. If something relevant appears, he reaches out to commodity managers immediately. The first step is to understand whether contingency plans exist at the Tier 1 level. From there, decisions follow.
In one example, early signals around DRAM shortages led to actions that would not have been taken otherwise:
- Building safety stock despite normal inventory constraints
- Identifying single-source exposure
- Starting dual sourcing strategies
The decision wasn’t based on instinct. It was based on understanding how the risk connected to actual products and revenue.
Time as the real constraint
One of the clearest frameworks Shakeel shared was how he explains value internally. He breaks response capability into four parts:
- Time to awareness
- Time to action
- Time to recover
- Time to survive
Historically, the longest delay was at the beginning. It could take days to understand what an event meant for Belden. With data consolidated and mapped, that time drops significantly. He described going from multiple days to minutes to understand exposure. That shift changes everything that follows.
Teams can act earlier. Suppliers can be engaged sooner. Inventory and sourcing decisions can be made with more context.
The outcome is not just faster response. It is a longer window to absorb and manage disruption.
Driving change across the organization
This did not happen in isolation. Belden rolled this out across multiple business units and integrated supplier participation into the process.
Supplier engagement turned out to be important. Instead of chasing data, teams could collect structured responses through a single workflow.
At the same time, the internal model was kept practical. Start with core data. Build the model. Expand over time.
That approach made adoption manageable.
What changed
The operational impact is meaningful, but what stood out more is how decisions are now made.
Questions that previously required coordination across multiple teams can now be answered quickly. Revenue at risk can be quantified. Supplier prioritization can be explained. Actions can be taken earlier.
As Shakeel put it in the prep discussions, data on its own is not enough. The value comes from how it is used to make decisions.
What I took away
There is a lot of discussion right now about visibility, resilience, and AI in supply chains. What Belden showed is what it looks like when those ideas are applied in a practical way.
The shift is not from having no data to having data. It is from disconnected data to decisions that are consistently informed by it.
The Sense → Recommend → Act model we’ve been building toward reflects that same direction.
- Sense what is happening
- Understand what it means to the business
- Act with enough confidence to move early
Disruptions are not going away. What changes is how quickly an organization understands the impact and responds.
That is what Belden demonstrated in Barcelona.
