Efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness are the key components of a resilient supply chain, says Paul Webb, regional vice president of enterprise supply chain at Coupa.

If “disruption” is one word that supply chain managers can’t avoid hearing today, “resilience” should be another. To Webb, without the indispensable components of efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness, there is no resilience, and absent that, coming back from disruption is infinitely harder, maybe impossible.

Unpacking it all, he asks, “Have we structured our supply chains to be as efficient as possible? So a key question would be, do you know how much of your spend or unit volume is going not by design, and what is the cost per unit of that? Do we know how much is by design versus [by] rogue shipment?”

Given that disruptions won’t stop occurring, companies must determine if they can orchestrate executable changes to respond. “Do we know how we're going to change the planning system to orchestrate a different supply chain in different events?” asks Webb.

Then there’s the responsiveness piece. Webb says that comes down to knowing how long it will take to make decisions. “In my experience, when these disruptions come through, it's really not a case of just one disruption. Normally, you have this waterfall effect of one disruption leading to something else.”

Obviously, economic uncertainty remains, and many companies are laden with inventory. One of the biggest problems as Webb sees it stems from planning systems that are largely running on historical data. “A lot of people use customer orders to signal how they should replenish in the future. Maybe they swapped over to invoices, but through supply chain shortages, their invoice stream is messed up as well. So I don't think we're past the disruptions, because everyone's baseline or the feed into the planning systems is not as clean as it potentially could be.”