The world is investing heavily in supply chain resilience. Re-shoring or near-shoring factories, “just-in-case” inventories, and qualifying alternative suppliers are among the most common ways that companies are building resilience. However, these strategies come with tremendous complexity and a price tag of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars. Such approaches are financially untenable in the long term for small and medium-sized companies, especially in the current environment of high interest rates, suppressed corporate valuations, and low investment activity.
So how can these companies achieve supply chain resilience?
Small and medium-sized businesses must “weaponize” their size, agility and speed of execution by affording themselves an “information advantage” that allows them to act rapidly on information that others lack. An effective playbook contains the following three components:
