For decades, supply chains were designed primarily around cost and efficiency. Globalisation, lean inventories, and just-in-time production enabled companies to operate at minimal margins. Yet the disruptions of recent years, from the COVID-19 pandemic to geopolitical tensions, extreme weather, and raw-material shortages, has exposed the fragility of this model.
Today, resilience has become a strategic capability. Organisations are recognising that supply chains built solely for efficiency, struggle to absorb shocks. Resilient supply chains, by contrast, can anticipate, adapt, and recover while maintaining service levels and profitability. A Gartner Supply Chain Survey1 (2024) found that 83% of global supply chain leaders now prioritise resilience, up from just 45% before the pandemic, underscoring a clear shift from “cheapest” to “strongest.”
Understanding the New Risk Landscape
Uncertainty is no longer an occasional issue; it has become a constant aspect of global trade. Disruptions arise from multiple directions:
- Geopolitical instability, including trade restrictions and regional conflicts.
- Climate-related events affecting production and logistics networks.
- Cybersecurity threats across increasingly connected digital supply chains.
- Demand volatility and supply shocks driven by inflation and market fluctuations.
According to Lund et al.2 (2020), companies can expect month-long disruptions every 3.7 years on average, with the potential to erode up to 45% of one year’s EBITDA over a decade. Building resilience is therefore not only a defensive strategy, but also a financial imperative.
Resilience and Efficiency Can Coexist
A common misconception is that resilience inevitably increases cost. In reality, modern supply chains can achieve both efficiency and resilience through intelligent design, enhanced visibility, and proactive risk management. Leading organisations focus on three levers:
- Visibility and transparency
Digital control towers and predictive analytics enable faster detection of disruption, improved exception management, and more informed decision-making according to Deloitte3 (2018). - Diversification and optionality
Multi-tier, multi-location sourcing models, including nearshoring and regionalization, reduce dependency and increase flexibility. - Collaboration and ecosystem strength
Partnerships with suppliers, logistics providers, and other stakeholders create shared resilience through joint data usage, capacity planning, and co-investment initiatives.
By embedding these capabilities, organisations can create supply chains that maintain cost discipline while strengthening continuity.
Data as the Foundation of Resilience
Digitalisation is transforming risk management. Advanced analytics, AI, and predictive tools provide real-time visibility across the value chain, enabling companies to anticipate disruptions and make informed, proactive decisions.
Supply chain control towers, centralised digital platforms for end-to-end monitoring, are a key enabler of this transformation. They enable companies to:
- Detect potential disruptions early through predictive alerts based on historical and real-time data.
- Simulate alternative scenarios, such as supplier outages, logistics delays, or sudden demand surges.
- Coordinate rapid, cross-functional decision-making by bringing together data from suppliers, logistics partners, and internal operations.
When combined, scenario modelling, predictive analytics, and digital visibility create a powerful foundation. They enable organisations not only to detect risks earlier, but also to act decisively to reduce the impact of disruptions, manage costs more effectively, and protect service levels. These capabilities are the defining markers of a truly resilient supply chain.
Building Flexibility into the Operating Model
Building a resilient supply chain requires more than isolated initiatives; it demands a structural shift in how organisations design and manage their operations. Companies that make meaningful progress focus on creating operating models that balance global scale with local agility, ensuring they can adjust quickly when conditions change. This often involves redesigning supply chain networks to distribute risk more evenly, maintaining strategic buffers of critical components or raw materials, and developing dual-sourcing strategies for essential categories to avoid dependency on a single supplier.
Resilient organisations also establish cross-functional crisis response teams that bring together expertise from procurement, logistics, operations, and finance, ensuring that decisions during disruption are both swift and aligned. They embed resilience into performance measurement by integrating it into KPIs, investment criteria, and governance frameworks, making it a foundational part of how success is assessed rather than an afterthought.
Organisations that excel in these capabilities recover up to 60%4 faster from disruptions and are better able to maintain customer satisfaction under pressure. This demonstrates that flexibility is not simply an operational attribute, but a strategic advantage that strengthens both continuity and competitiveness.
A Practical Roadmap for Resilience
Building a resilient supply chain requires structure and consistency. A practical roadmap includes:
- Map and assess vulnerabilities across all tiers and regions.
- Quantify risk exposure: financial, operational, and reputational.
- Design response playbooks for key scenarios (supply disruption, logistics delay, cyberattack, etc.).
- Invest in digital visibility: data platforms, predictive analytics, and control towers.
- Diversify sourcing and logistics while maintaining supplier collaboration.
- Embed resilience in governance, including KPIs, investment criteria, and leadership accountability.
Leading organisations also rehearse scenarios regularly to ensure confidence and speed when disruptions occur.
The Competitive Advantage of Resilience
Resilience has evolved into a source of strategic differentiation. Organisations that adapt quickly protect revenue, reputation, and customer trust: assets that take years to build and moments to lose.
At Argon & Co, we see this in practice: organisations that integrate resilience into their operating models don’t just survive disruption, but use it to strengthen competitiveness and innovation. Resilience is not the opposite of efficiency; it’s its evolution.
1 Stiffler, D. (2024). Gartner 2024 Women in Supply Chain Survey reveals limited progress; action needed by CSCOs. Gartner. Retrieved on 23rd of November 2025.
2 Lund, S., Manyika, J., Woetzel, L., Barriball, E., Krishnan, M., Alicke, K., Birshan, M., George, K., Smit, S., Swan, D., & Hutzler, K. (2020). Risk, resilience, and rebalancing in global value chains. In McKinsey Global Institute.
3 Deloitte (2018). The Supply Chain Control Tower
4 Argon & Co (2025). Beyond Resilience: Designing Businesses That Thrive in Disruption. Retrieved on 17th of November 2025 from: Argon & Co Whitepaper.
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