Resilience entered the operator''s vocabulary the hard way. A decade ago, the conversation around supply chains was almost entirely about cost — landed cost, conversion cost, freight per kilogram. Service levels were a constraint, not a strategy. Then came a pandemic, a canal blockage, a war, a credit squeeze, and a slow re-drawing of trade lines that is still underway. The word "resilience" began appearing on every board agenda. Most of the time, it appeared without a definition.
In 2025, resilience is no longer a slogan. It is a set of decisions an operator makes — usually before they are needed, and almost always at the expense of a short-term metric. What follows is how I think about those decisions, drawn from running large apparel operations through several of these shocks.
1. Resilience is a posture, not a project
You cannot buy resilience as a line item. There is no consultant deck that converts a fragile supply chain into a durable one in six months. The factories, suppliers, contracts, people, and information systems that determine how an organisation responds to a shock are the same ones that handle a normal Tuesday. If they are brittle on a Tuesday, they will fail on the day a shock arrives.
The work of resilience is therefore the work of operations itself: cleaner data, tighter S&OP, healthier supplier relationships, a workforce that has been trained for the second-best plan as well as the first. Treat it as a programme with a start and end date, and the muscle atrophies the moment the programme closes.
2. The honest cost of single-sourcing
For two decades, supply chain optimisation pushed the industry toward consolidation. Fewer suppliers, deeper relationships, better pricing. That logic was sound — until the supplier disappeared. The 2020–2022 disruptions made it obvious that the marginal saving from a single source is almost always smaller than the marginal cost of losing that source for a quarter.
The new posture is deliberate redundancy. Not three suppliers for every part, but two qualified sources for every component that sits on a critical path, and an active second source for the inputs whose absence would stop the line. The cost shows up in qualification time, audit overhead, and slightly higher unit pricing. The benefit shows up exactly once — and it is the reason the business is still operating.
According to McKinsey''s 2023 Taking the pulse of shifting supply chains survey, the share of companies running dual sourcing for critical components rose from 32% pre-pandemic to over 80% by 2023. The number that have sustained that posture into 2025 is smaller, because the cost discipline of the last two years has tempted many to consolidate again. That temptation is the test.
3. Inventory: from just-in-time to just-in-case-it-matters
Just-in-time made sense in a world where freight was predictable and lead times were stable. Neither has been true for five years. The reflexive correction — pile up inventory everywhere — is also wrong, because working capital is now expensive and obsolescence in fashion-driven categories is brutal.
The discipline is to segment. Strategic raw materials, long-lead components, and items with concentrated supplier exposure get a deliberate buffer. Commodity inputs with healthy markets stay lean. Finished goods are positioned closer to demand, not piled at origin. Boston Consulting Group''s 2024 work on inventory posture frames this well: the question is not "how much" but "where, and for what reason."
In practice this means an S&OP process that argues about inventory at the SKU-segment level, not at the aggregate. The aggregate number is for the CFO''s deck. The segment-level posture is what protects the business.
4. Supplier financial health is now a first-class signal
The most overlooked source of supply chain risk in 2024 and 2025 has been supplier insolvency. As interest rates rose, marginal suppliers ran out of working capital. Companies that monitored only quality and on-time delivery missed the warning signs, because by the time delivery slipped, the supplier was already past saving.
A modern resilience programme treats supplier financial health as a continuous signal, not an annual audit. Credit data, payment behaviour, capacity utilisation rumours from the floor, even the rate at which a supplier''s sales team turns over — these are leading indicators. Gartner''s 2024 supply risk research is clear that companies with structured supplier-risk monitoring detected distress on average four to six months earlier than those without it. Four months is the difference between an orderly re-sourcing and an emergency.
5. Nearshoring is not a slogan; it is an arithmetic exercise
For Indian manufacturers, the nearshoring conversation cuts both ways. Western brands are pulling work closer to home — Mexico for the US, North Africa and Türkiye for the EU. At the same time, the China-plus-one shift continues to add volume to India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh.
The arithmetic that decides where the work lands is no longer just cost-per-piece. It is cost-per-piece plus expected duty volatility, plus the probability-weighted cost of a six-week delay, plus the cost of capital tied up in transit. When that full equation is run, India remains highly competitive for categories where skill density and vertical integration matter — which is most of branded apparel — and structurally challenged in categories that have already commoditised.
The operator''s job is to know which category the business is in, and to invest accordingly. Trying to be everywhere is a path to being competitive nowhere.
6. Visibility is the cheapest resilience investment
Most supply chain failures in the last five years were not "unknown unknowns." They were known risks that nobody saw in time, because the information lived in seven systems and three spreadsheets. A control tower — even a modest one — that brings supplier status, in-transit inventory, capacity, and demand signal into one operational view pays for itself the first time it surfaces a problem early.
The mistake is to over-engineer it. A spreadsheet refreshed daily by a disciplined team beats an unfinished AI platform every time. Start with the five decisions the operations team makes every week, build the view that supports those decisions, and expand from there.
7. The workforce is part of the supply chain
This is the part most discussions of resilience leave out. A factory floor is not a fungible resource. The supervisors, line leaders, and quality teams who absorb a sudden change in plan are the actual mechanism by which resilience happens. If they are overworked, under-trained, or quietly leaving, no amount of dual sourcing will save the operation.
The investments that matter here are unglamorous: structured training, clear career paths, a culture where the floor can stop the line and be thanked for it. The World Economic Forum''s 2024 Future of Jobs report notes that manufacturing employers consistently rank workforce stability among the top three drivers of operational performance — ahead of automation and ahead of capex.
The operator''s playbook
If I had to compress the last five years of lessons into a short list, it would read like this:
- Build redundancy where loss would stop the line. Not everywhere. Where it matters.
- Segment inventory posture by risk, not by accounting category. The aggregate number lies.
- Monitor supplier financial health continuously. Quality and on-time-delivery are lagging indicators.
- Run the full nearshoring arithmetic, including duty volatility and capital tied up in transit. Don''t outsource the decision to a trend.
- Invest in visibility before you invest in optimisation. You cannot optimise what you cannot see.
- Treat the workforce as part of the supply chain, because it is.
Resilience is not a project that ends. It is the quiet, daily discipline of running an operation that can absorb a bad week without losing the next quarter. The companies that take it seriously will look, from the outside, only modestly different from those that do not — until the day they don''t.
References
- McKinsey & Company. Taking the pulse of shifting supply chains, 2023.
- Boston Consulting Group. Real-World Supply Chain Resilience, 2024.
- Gartner. Supply Chain Risk Management Survey, 2024.
- World Economic Forum. Future of Jobs Report, 2024.
- Harvard Business Review. "Building Resilience into the Supply Chain," 2020 — and the follow-up commentary in 2023.
- McKinsey Global Institute. Risk, resilience, and rebalancing in global value chains, 2020.