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Visibility within the supply chain is something that supply-chain-management professionals often identify as one of their biggest obstacles to performance improvement—the fact that they might be able to see one tier down the line, like who’s supplying to them, but they have no visibility as to the suppliers of their suppliers. So the lack of that visibility impacts their ability to plan, and also impacts their ability to mitigate risk in these types of situations when we have a disruption.
Supply chains actually prepare, and they have contingency planning. They do all sorts of risk-mitigation techniques, but typically when there’s a disruption, that disruption is local or regionalized. Think about wildfires, hurricanes, the Japanese earthquake and the tsunami. We had Maersk, a cyberattack on Maersk, which shut down parts of the supply chain.
These are all disruptive events, but the difference in this event is that it’s global. It’s happening at all places at all times, and it’s impacting both supply and demand. So, that’s what’s made this incredibly challenging for supply-chain-management professionals to mitigate. I don’t think many companies prepared or thought about a universal, basically a coupled, correlated disruption across the globe. Most of them have in place regional activities so that they can pre-position inventory in the face of a hurricane.
Walmart. Home Depot. H-E-B has been doing this for years. H-E-B is a regional grocery chain. These companies know how to deal with regional disruptions. And many of them have advanced warning indicators, so they’re basically scanning the marketplace for any disruption that might occur, and some of them, H-E-B included, had early warnings that something was going on in China, and they started to actually increase their inventory levels in their grocery system in anticipation of a disruption.
