Since 2020 the profession has absorbed a run of shocks that would each have been a career-defining event on their own. The lessons drawn from them are often stated as universal rules — hold more stock, dual source everything, bring production closer. Every one of those carries a permanent cost paid against an occasional benefit.
Resilience is a portfolio decision
Treating every line as equally critical is the most expensive possible answer. The categories that justify redundancy are usually those where the input is hard to substitute, the qualification cycle is long, and a stoppage halts something downstream. That is rarely more than a fraction of the portfolio.
Dual sourcing is not two names on a list
A second supplier who has never run production volume, whose tooling is unqualified, and who shares your primary supplier’s sub-tier is not a second source. It is a second invoice. Real redundancy means periodically buying from the alternate at a volume that keeps the relationship and the qualification alive.
Visibility earns its keep before the crisis
Teams that coped best were not the ones with the most sophisticated risk dashboards. They were the ones who already knew who their sub-tier suppliers were, because they had asked before they needed to know. That mapping is unglamorous, and it is the highest-return resilience work most teams are not doing.
Decide in advance what you will do
The decisions that went badly were mostly made under time pressure without a prior view of what mattered. Agreeing in calm conditions which customers get allocated supply, and which products get de-prioritised, converts a scramble into an execution problem.