New Demands on Global Supply Chain Management

For more than 20 years, the goal of global supply chain management was cost efficiency. But disruptions like Brexit, tariff disputes, natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic have elevated the importance of resilience and agility in global supply chain management. In fact, Gartner’s “Weathering the Supply Chain Storm” research identified resilience and agility in the supply chain as the two main priorities for almost all organizations, with about 90% planning investments to make their supply chain more resilient over the next two years. But there is fear that prioritizing resilience and agility in global supply chain management will increase operating costs, and so supply chain leaders may be forced to make difficult trade-offs as part of global supply chain management decision making.