Insights
Software doesn't make supply chains resilient. The people operating them do.
Every time something goes wrong in a supply chain — a port backs up, a supplier goes dark, tariffs shift overnight — the first call is always the same: "We need better visibility." Then someone buys a platform. Then someone builds a dashboard. Then the next disruption hits and the dashboard is six hours behind and nobody trusts it anyway.
I've been through this cycle enough times to have opinions about it.
The technology isn't the problem. The technology is actually pretty good these days. The problem is that resilience isn't a feature you can buy. It's a capability you have to build, and it lives in people, not in software.
I've watched a planning team with basic tools — honestly, mostly Excel — navigate a major supply disruption in about 72 hours. They knew the operation cold. They had relationships across functions. When the planner called the procurement lead at 6am, the procurement lead picked up, because they'd worked together for years and trusted each other. They rerouted, substituted, expedited — not because a system told them to, but because they understood the trade-offs well enough to make calls in real time.
I've also watched a team with a multi-million-dollar visibility platform freeze during a disruption because nobody trusted the data enough to act on it. The dashboard said one thing, the planner's experience said another, and by the time they resolved the gap, the window to respond had closed. They ended up on the phone doing the same thing the first team did, except three days later.
The difference wasn't technology. It was depth. Depth of knowledge, depth of relationships, depth of practiced judgment under pressure.
Cross-train people across the value chain. I'm not talking about a lunch-and-learn. I mean genuinely have your planners spend time understanding procurement constraints. Have your logistics coordinators sit with manufacturing long enough to understand lead time realities. Most supply chain orgs keep these functions in silos and then act surprised when coordination breaks down under pressure. Of course it does. These people have never worked together when things were calm. Why would they suddenly collaborate well in a crisis?
Run tabletop exercises. This is the one nobody wants to do because it feels like overkill. It isn't. Take your cross-functional team, give them a realistic disruption scenario, and make them work through it in real time with real trade-offs. Who calls the customer? Who approves the expedite cost? Who decides which product line gets priority when you can't serve both? Doing this once a quarter builds the muscle memory that no playbook provides. I've seen it work. Repeatedly.
Invest in the planner, not just the planning tool. The best IBP software in the world is only as good as the analyst reading the output and the leader acting on it. Development budgets in supply chain organizations skew heavily toward certifications and tool training. The actual gap — the one that matters when things go sideways — is judgment, communication, and the ability to influence people you don't report to. Those are leadership skills, and they're chronically underfunded in operations.
Technology makes your supply chain faster. People make it resilient. The organizations that figured that out before 2020 navigated the last five years differently. The ones still learning that lesson are the ones still buying dashboards.
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