Supply Chain

The supply chain matters to continuity because your customer experiences your supplier's failure as your failure. An organisation can have flawless internal plans and still stop within days when a single logistics route or component source breaks. The dependent decision is scope: leaders must decide how far beyond their own walls the continuity programme reaches, and who pays for that reach. For Gulf economies built on trade routes and imported components, this is a strategic question, not a technical one.

Supply chain continuity is usually shared between procurement and the continuity function: procurement owns the relationships, continuity owns the dependency map. The map is refreshed at least annually and after every major sourcing change, and it lives alongside the business impact analysis. Practical thresholds keep it honest: identify every supplier whose failure stops a critical service within 7 days, and every category where one country provides more than half the volume. For each of those, hold a defined answer — buffer stock measured in weeks, an alternative source, or a contractual recovery commitment.

The frequent error is stopping at tier one: assessing direct suppliers while the real fragility sits two levels up, where several "independent" vendors buy from the same factory. Questionnaires alone rarely reveal this; mapping and joint exercises do. Extending resilience across the supply chain is addressed in module M2 "From enterprise risk management to business resilience" of the ERGP programme.