Four Strategies to Hardwire Resilience into Your Supply Chain

The manufacturing and distribution industry is grappling with its fair share of supply chain challenges and disruptions—raw materials shortages, labor challenges, transportation bottlenecks, rising costs, and tariffs, to name just a few. Disruptions have become the new “business as usual.” But there’s plenty that manufacturing and distribution leaders can do to position their businesses to better withstand and accommodate these ever-present challenges. Let’s dive in and see how leading businesses are using strategy to keep moving forward.

Sometimes a disruption is more than just a disruption

Many of the challenges organizations face aren’t just disruptive but existential with far-reaching ripple effects. As an example, the recent changes to port fees caused one U.S.-based ocean carrier to be classified as a roll-on/roll-off container vessel (versus a container vessel) for the first time, resulting in new tariff charges of $1.4 million per year for each of its 25 ships.

For this (and likely many) carriers, a $34 million tariff payment every year may be more than they can sustain, jeopardizing the organization’s ability to operate within the United States. If the carrier is forced to relocate its headquarters, its customers will have no choice but to find new suppliers for their own mission-critical business, and their customers may have to adjust to new pricing and product availability.

This is just one example, and it illustrates how challenges like regulation shifts can snowball from a single company into a complex global endeavor.

Four winning strategies to rise above and move forward

With the right strategy, mindset, and team, manufacturing and distribution leaders can not only set their organizations up for short-term success but lay the foundation for long-term resilience. Some leading organizations have cracked the code on hard-wiring resilience into their operations; let’s take a look at their four leading strategies and outline how other businesses can get there.

Crunch the numbers

This might seem obvious, but if leaders want to help their businesses overcome (and even thrive despite) disruptions, they need to have a meticulous understanding of the financial ramifications.

This means diving deep into the organization’s financials. How exactly will tariff policies trickle through the balance sheet? How will your specific cost structures influence each of your customer segments? What costs can be passed along?

No disruption lasts forever. Even regulatory changes like tariffs might not last longer than a few years. Leading organizations don’t drop everything and uproot their operations when a new disruption comes along. They don’t change where or how they conduct business at the drop of a hat.

They treat each disruption as a financial variable, dig into their balance sheets, and determine the best path forward. Their long-term strategic perspective at the customer level is what fuels their short-term agility.

“China for China”

For global organizations, one of the best ways to insulate against challenges like supply chain disruptions and trade policy shifts is to adopt a “China for China” approach.

Rather than operating a handful of global production hubs and building distribution networks all over the world, manufacturers can go to market directly in a specific region. Using China as an example, this means operating within the Chinese domestic market using Chinese resources, sales teams and marketing strategies.

By reducing organizational reliance on global networks and shortening (therefore strengthening) supply chains, organizations can greatly improve resiliency and insulate themselves from many disruptions. Many leading manufacturers and distributors have adopted China for China strategies in response to tariffs, and they’ll reap the benefits for many years to come—even if the regulatory picture changes.

Let advanced tech bear the burden—but don’t forget the human connection

Labor shortages are not only an ever-present challenge that manufacturers and distributors are grappling with, but a variable that exacerbates other challenges. When you’re short-staffed, you can’t be as nimble in the wake of disruptions; you might not be able to call in relief staff when your current team has been on code red for 12 hours; you might not have the precise expertise that could help develop a solution for your precise environment.

No manufacturer is immune to labor challenges—what separates leading organizations from the rest is their ability to make lemonade with advanced technology. Rather than spinning their wheels trying to fill all their labor gaps, leading manufacturers are beginning to pivot to a new strategy: implementing advanced solutions like robotics, cobots, and automation.

These tools can increase throughput, boost quality, make human workers more efficient, and improve shop-floor safety by taking on more dangerous tasks. Plus, they make operations smarter overall by necessitating a more data-driven approach. Worker quality of life improves, since they’ll need upskilling and additional training to wield these advanced tools. With technology and data proficiency, manufacturers will be in a much better position to anticipate challenges, determine the best path forward, and move on.

Pursue overall efficiency

For manufacturers, disruptions aren’t going anywhere. And there’s no predicting them 100% of the time. Leading manufacturers understand this and, in response, are choosing to focus on what they can control: their organizations’ overall efficiency.

Their operations are never fully optimized; there is always room for improvement; there are always new avenues of efficiency to pursue. Whether it’s investing in cutting-edge tech to move the needle by 1%, limiting hiring in favor of agentic AI, or freezing non-essential travel, the top manufacturing leaders are constantly on the hunt for incremental efficiency improvements. It’s a continuous mindset, not a discrete project.

More efficiency means less waste—wasted time, wasted resources, wasted efforts. A truly efficient organization will be able to identify disruptions and deftly spring into action. No hand-wringing over deciding on next steps; no hours of meetings where you make a plan to make a plan. Efficient leaders and their organizations see the problem and take action. This is the kind of strategy with endless applications and no downsides.

One step at a time

Not only are manufacturing and distribution challenges ever-present, but they’re increasingly common. The more complex our world (and, therefore, our global business environment) becomes, the more disruptions we’ll see.

Leaders need to make it a priority to dial in their long-term strategies to weather these storms. That said, they shouldn’t rush into an ill-fitting or half-baked strategy. It’s worth taking the time to be methodical and get it right the first time.

•  Start with a customer-first view, then audit your own organization. What kind of disruption tends to uproot key relationships and internal operations the most? What exactly happens?
• Next, consult experts (both within and outside your organization) to determine which strategy should be prioritized as a path forward.
• Proceed intentionally and thoughtfully, leaving time for iteration, internal feedback, and speed bumps.

What’s most important is continuous customer feedback that supports your effort—even if progress feels marginal (or nonexistent!) at times.

In time, the work will pay off. Whether leaders adopt all four strategies or just one, they’ll see meaningful changes across their organization. In manufacturing, the future doesn’t belong to the organizations with the strongest business plan or best-selling product—it belongs to those that make constant strides toward resiliency, adaptability, and continuous improvement with a customer-centric mindset.