Supply Chain Resilience & Redundancy and Optimising Your Supply Chain

What is it that we call supply chain resilience and redundancies? 

Fundamentally, supply chain resilience refers to the ability of a company to bounce back from a large disruption. It is the capacity to absorb stress, quickly return to normal performance levels after shocks and thrive in volatile environments.

There are six pillars of supply chain resilience:

1. Increasing the ability to absorb shocks

2. Redesigning the global network

3. Setting new parameters for supply chain buffers

4. Proactively managing suppliers

5. Reacting faster when disruption occurs

6. Managing the multi-enterprise supply chain.

Often, the best way to ensure your company’s ability to quickly reconfigure and recover during a crisis is to institute redundancies in the supply chain. Supply chain redundancy is the ability to withstand any failure at any point in the primary supply chain by using backup resources.

Redundancies act to;

1. Support any weak spots in the supply chain

2. Prevent slowdowns or shutdowns

3. Provide safety stock in case of delivery failures or losses

4. Ensure competition, availability and design quality when a redundancy of suppliers is implemented.

Building redundancies can ensure lean operations because they are designed to help facilities avoid the significant waste of time, effort and money involved in a system breakdown.

So how does instilling resilience and redundancies optimise the supply chain?

Firstly, this won't be the saving grace that makes your supply-chain work brilliantly efficient at all times. 

And there is no rulebook or secret formula to optimise the supply chain.

It will vary with industry, market size, market share, etc. It really is dependent on the characteristics of your industry and the nature of your business.

But the point is by creating resilience and preparing for redundancies then your supply-chain will run more smoothly as you will be able to absorb shocks and plan and mitigate risks. It doesn't mean they won't happen!

Leading companies are, however, developing innovative capabilities to re-engineer the interworking of their supply chains. For example, risk-focused analytics engines, simulation, and end-to-end transparency are all being utilised to design optimal supply chains. 

The approaches are pretty much endless. 

Regardless of the approach you choose to take, it is imperative to invest in your supply chain.

You can read more about resilience, redundancies and optimising your business supply chain here.