The New Geography of Global Supply Chains

Resilience starts with a specific failure

A supply chain connects materials, factories, transport and customers. A firm cannot make every link immune to disruption, so the useful starting question is which interruption would stop a particular product or essential service. An alternative supplier, extra inventory or a different route is valuable only if it addresses that failure.

The OECD review of supply-chain resilience argues for judging the performance of the whole system, including trade-offs, rather than pursuing a single objective such as security of supply.

Two suppliers may share one bottleneck

A buyer may contract with two companies and still rely on one upstream factory for a critical part. Mapping the origin of key inputs matters more than simply counting supplier names. The practical test is whether the second option can deliver usable volume when the first fails.

For an indispensable component, ask how long qualification takes, how much stock can be held safely and whether substitute parts meet the same requirements. The answers vary by product; a perishable item and a specialized chip cannot use the same inventory plan.

Moving production is not a complete plan

Regional production can shorten some journeys, but a new assembly site still needs workers, power, equipment and inputs. Customs paperwork, ports, warehouses and trucking can remain bottlenecks even when the factory is closer to customers.

A company should compare the capacity and cost of the new arrangement with the risk it removes. A pilot line is not the same as a backup able to replace full production during a disruption.

Test a supplier claim with a dependency card

Imagine a small workshop that needs a particular hinge. Supplier A and supplier B have different names but buy from the same component factory. A second invoice address does not remove that shared dependency. This is an illustrative scenario, not a description of an actual manufacturer.

Make one row for the component, upstream maker, replacement lead time, usable stock, qualification requirements and person responsible for checking each answer. Leave an unknown field marked unknown rather than guessing. The useful output is a question the purchasing team can answer with records.

Try changing one assumption: suppose delivery slips by a week. Identify which order would be affected first and what evidence would justify promising a customer a new date. Do not label the plan resilient simply because a backup supplier appears in a spreadsheet.

References and method

OECD: Supply-chain resilience and preparedness

Sources provide the background or official resources identified in the text. Worked examples and worksheets are UShotNews teaching aids, not reports of first-hand testing or independent research. Prepared with AI assistance and reviewed for scope and source relevance on October 26, 2026.