The U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC) has introduced a new supply chain risk assessment tool, designed to diagnose potential disruptions before they occur. 

The tool — known as SCALE — allows the U.S. government to weigh supply chain risk across the entire country's economy, and then provides an in-depth diagnostic assessment of what's driving those issues in any specific sector. To do that, it focuses on three main areas: how important an industry is to the U.S. government, how exposed this industry might be to disruption, and how difficult it would be for that industry to recover from a disruption. 

"Think of it as your annual physical, combined with your X-rays, your blood work and your MRI," assistant secretary of commerce Grant Harris said during the USDOC's supply chain summit on September 10. 

As an example, Harris pointed to how the tool would have flagged personal protective equipment (PPE) as an area of systemic risk in the lead-up to the pandemic in 2020, which could have helped avert the nationwide PPE shortage that hamstrung the U.S. health care system while COVID-19 was first spreading.

SCALE is the second supply chain tool rolled out by the Biden administration in the wake of the pandemic, joining 2022's Freight Logistics Optimizations Works (FLOW) initiative. FLOW was designed to collect, aggregate and anonymize information shared by ports, importers and ocean carriers, to weigh future demands against current capacity and keep the shipping industry running smoothly in the face of potential shortages or delays.