Resilience on Offense
Reinventing Defensive Supply Chain Risk with AI
Resilience is often seen as a form of insurance. But expanding its definition to include “enabler of business growth” allows supply chains to seize new opportunities, boost competitive advantage, and delight customers. We share the three factors – mindset, tech, and talent – that are key to blending both defensive and offensive capabilities, empowering companies to win far more often than they lose.
On 3 April 2024, Taiwan was hit by its biggest earthquake in 25 years. The 7.2 magnitude quake struck Hualien County on the island’s east coast, killing and injuring more than 1,100 people and damaging buildings, roads, and bridges in the region. However, the level of death and destruction was nowhere near that caused by a similarly powerful quake in 1999 in Jiji.
Why the difference?
As with any major natural disaster, luck in the form of geographical factors played a part. But the Taiwanese authorities made significant investment investments in resilience after the quake in 1999. In 2024, that investment saved lives and kept businesses running.
In supply chain, our data and analysis found that discussions relating to supply chain resilience issues almost doubled from 2020 onwards as Covid-19 spread rapidly across the world. And although the frequency of discussion has dropped in the past two years, 33% of CEOs have continued to talk about supply chain resilience to a significant degree in the face of ongoing disruptions.
Increasingly, the business case is no longer simply about protecting organizations from risks and disruptive events; it’s also a question of how supply chain resilience can make a company’s operations more agile and support top-line growth.
Supply Chain Resilience Delivers Business Benefits
The upsides of supply chain resilience include greater agility as demand changes, improved customer service and satisfaction levels, increased market share, superior revenue growth, and higher margins. Zero100 recently analyzed the financial performance of 25 global companies that had invested in dedicated supply chain risk and resilience staff over a 12-month period. Compared to the other 200-plus brands in our database, these 25 companies saw 6x revenue growth, less margin erosion, and a smaller EPS deviation from market expectations.
While we can’t attribute better financial performance in these cases to supply chain resilience specifically, our analysis does suggest a correlation between the investments that companies choose to make (in people, in this case) and business outcomes.
The Three Enablers of Resilience on Offense
To succeed in making the transition from solid supply chain risk management to resilience on offense requirements, leaders need to reframe the organizational mindset and equip their teams with data, AI-powered technologies, and a blend of digital and business skills that enable resilience strategies to be designed and implemented effectively.
MINDSET
This is an important component in framing supply chain resilience not only as a defense mechanism but also as an opportunity to contribute to a company’s growth strategy. Business executives and supply chain leaders often think about risk and resilience in terms of an insurance policy. But insurance is implicitly defensive—it shields an organization from downside risks rather than explicitly enabling upside opportunities. If business leaders see supply chain resilience only as a form of insurance, the danger is that they won’t want to pay for it—especially if disruptions that are anticipated during a particular financial period don’t actually materialize.
TECHNOLOGY
Today, there is no single supply chain-wide platform (digital twin or control tower) that can provide instant, cross-functional risk assessments and guide decision-making based on likely customer and financial impact. Given the complexity of modern supply chains and the wide array of risk factors that can disrupt them, it is impractical for large companies to rely on spreadsheets and manual efforts—as many still do today. Resilience on offense requires the capture and generation of data to improve visibility and digital technologies, such as AI, to power analytics and simulation.
TALENT
Although much of the day-to-day implementation of supply chain risk and resilience strategies is performed within existing functional roles, supply chain organizations require some dedicated resources too.
But our data analysis underlines the fact that most supply chain organizations—even those hiring for dedicated risk and resilience talent—are currently playing defense on supply chain resilience. Indeed, just five of the 25 companies we refer to above used language in their job descriptions that suggested they positioned resilience as an offensive play. So, just as with mindset change and AI adoption, there are plenty of opportunities for supply chain leaders to upskill their talent base to support this transition over the next few years.
Resilience on offense is the next big move in the supply chain arena. And to win tomorrow, leaders will need to charge ahead on these key enablers today.
The full report shares original Zero100 data on resilience, real-life use cases, and specific recommendations on areas of focus for a resilience strategy that drives competitive advantage.
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