Situation 05 / Operations & Supply Chain
Your supply chain just broke.
Written by Brianne West, Co-Managing Partner
Your manufacturer has stopped producing. Your 3PL cannot ship. Your packaging is delayed. Unfortunately, customers still expect their orders.
The situation
Something critical suddenly fails.
A manufacturer goes into administration.
A supplier cannot source an ingredient.
Packaging is six weeks late.
A warehouse migration goes badly.
An ERP integration stops releasing orders.
A freight route changes.
Or the business discovers that its supposedly resilient supply chain depends on one supplier, one site and one person who knows how everything works.
Consumer businesses often build supply chains gradually.
Then growth arrives.
Complexity increases.
What used to work becomes fragile.
What matters now
The immediate question is not: “How do we redesign our entire supply chain?”
It is: “What stops the business from trading?”
Identify the genuinely critical constraints first.
- Products.
- Components.
- Suppliers.
- Systems.
- People.
- Customers.
- Cash.
Then determine how much time you actually have.
What we would do
Build a live operational control view covering:
- available inventory
- inbound inventory
- critical SKUs
- supplier capacity
- manufacturing schedules
- component availability
- customer commitments
- logistics capacity
- systems dependencies
- cash requirements
Prioritise hero products and strategically important customers.
Create contingencies. Source alternatives. Escalate supplier relationships. Simplify wherever possible.
Once the immediate problem is stabilised, redesign the weak points so the business doesn't simply return to the same level of fragility.
The bigger lesson
Efficient and resilient are not the same thing.
The cheapest supply chain in the spreadsheet can become extraordinarily expensive when one component stops moving.
Relevant capabilities
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