Most mid-market companies have completed, by now, the easy supply-chain work. They have diversified the most concentrated of their tier-one suppliers. They have built modest amounts of strategic inventory in the categories where they were most exposed. They have established the rudiments of a supplier-risk dashboard that someone, occasionally, looks at.
This work was useful. It is also, in nearly every case, an insufficient response to the actual structural risk in the mid-market supply chain. The harder work — the work that distinguishes the resilient operator from the theatrical one — is the work that requires the company to look past tier one, into the supplier base of its suppliers, and into the structural patterns of geographic concentration that no tier-one diversification can address.
I do not believe that any mid-market company can build itself into a fully resilient supply chain. The economics do not permit it, and the operational and capital cost of trying would, in most cases, exceed the cost of the disruptions the program is designed to prevent. The work I would press on the mid-market operator is, instead, the work of accurate visibility — knowing, in detail and with clarity, where the actual concentration risks are, what the realistic response options are, and what the company will do, specifically, in the first seventy-two hours of the disruptions it has identified as plausible. This is meaningfully less expensive than building a resilient supply chain, and meaningfully more useful than the supplier-diversification dashboards that most mid-market companies have substituted for it.