Every pillar of the supply chain — plan, source, make and deliver — must be resilient, says Girsh Dhaneshwar, vice president and consulting practice leader at Cognizant.

If resilience isn’t new to supply chain managers, it’s certainly amplified in importance today, Dhaneshwar says. Geopolitical events; climate change; environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns, and the labor shortage all combine to cause disruptions and make resilience “super-critical.”

Resilience, in his view, is a multidimensional problem to be solved. “One of the best ways of looking at it is to consider the four supply-chain pillars: plan, source, make and deliver. Look at the sub-capabilities within each of these and start asking the question: Is my supply chain resilient?

“As an example,” Dhaneshwar says, “demand volatility is one thing causing disruption, and that's where something like demand sensing tells you how to increase resilience. With sourcing, it's the supplier diversification you need to increase resilience. When you think of make, it's all the automation needed to bring resiliency in manufacturing. And lastly, when you look at delivery, it's the complexity in the last-mile delivery and the disruptions caused by, say, weather and your ability to react to that.

“If you take the four pillars within supply chain and break it down to capabilities, that's what will help you define what resilience means for your organization,” Dhaneshwar says.

Responsiveness, agility, reliability, cost and flexibility are the five key dimensions of any supply chain. Decide which is critical to your business model and start assessing its resilience, he says. 

“If you're in the business of supplying oxygen to hospitals, reliability far outweighs any other parameter, and that's where you want to build the most resilience. So look at these five parameters, decide the relative weight, and create a blueprint or baseline of where you stand on resilience.”

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