Supply chain resilience isn’t a data problem; it’s a judgment problem

For years, supply chain leaders have been told that resilience comes from better technology. Invest in visibility. Build control towers. Deploy AI. Improve forecasting. Create digital twins.  All of those investments matter. But they miss a critical reality: technology and tools can identify problems, yet people still decide what to do about them. The pattern repeats with each new iteration: the capability improves, yet the decision still lands on a person.

Recent interviews conducted with experienced supply chain executives suggest that the next frontier of resilience has shifted away from software alone toward a managerial judgment focus.

Better data doesn’t mean better decisions

Consider how risk actually unfolds.  A disruption rarely arrives with a label attached. Managers are forced to interpret incomplete information, assess potential consequences, and decide whether to act before all the facts are known. The challenge is deciding which risks deserve attention and which can be ignored.  That distinction matters because modern supply chains face an overwhelming number of potential threats. Geopolitical instability, cyberattacks, commodity volatility, transportation bottlenecks, labor shortages, regulatory changes, extreme weather events, and rapidly changing technologies all compete for management attention.  No organization can respond equally to all of them.

The executives we interviewed consistently described resilience as a process of prioritization and judgment rather than prediction.  One executive noted that artificial intelligence is increasingly handling routine analysis and scenario modeling. As a result, the most valuable employees are no longer the people who have all the answers. They are the people who know which questions to ask.

Access to information is becoming democratized. Visibility platforms have become standard. Analytics capabilities continue to improve. As information becomes more abundant, the source of competitive advantage shifts. Judgement becomes the differentiator.

Resilience must part of everyday decision-making

The executives also highlighted an uncomfortable truth about risk management. Many organizations have risk management processes, but far fewer have risk management cultures.  On paper, companies often maintain formal procedures for identifying, assessing, mitigating, and monitoring risks. In practice, however, risk management frequently remains disconnected from daily decision-making. Part of the disconnect is structural, since accountability for risk often sits outside the supply chain function itself.

The difference between planning for risk and managing risk is significant. Organizations that merely document risks tend to discover problems after they occur. Organizations that operationalize risk management integrate risk discussions into procurement decisions, sourcing strategies, inventory policies, and capacity planning. Risk becomes part of how decisions are made rather than a separate compliance exercise. It is one of the inputs considered in everyday trade-offs rather than a report that is filed and forgotten.

Technology can support that process, but it cannot replace it. The interviews repeatedly emphasized that digital tools are most valuable when they accelerate decision-making rather than simply generate more information.  One executive described AI as achieving levels of speed and accuracy that would be impossible for humans working manually but also stressed that managers still determine how those insights are used.

Building resilience requires flexibility

The interviews also revealed another challenge. Many supply chains remain structurally inflexible regardless of how much data is available.  Managers can often reroute trucks, adjust schedules, or reallocate inventory. They cannot instantly create rail capacity, build new ports, qualify suppliers, or reconfigure transportation networks. More data or visibility does not create capacity. Structural flexibility develops over years of investment and relationship building.  This means resilience is not simply a technology problem; it is also an organizational design problem, and companies must build capabilities before they need them.

Perhaps the most important finding from the interviews concerns how organizations develop future leaders. Several executives emphasized the value of broad experiences over narrow specialization. Supply chain professionals who rotate across functions, understand multiple parts of the business, and develop a total-systems perspective appear better equipped to manage uncertainty than those who spend their careers optimizing a single activity. This insight becomes increasingly important as artificial intelligence assumes more analytical work. One executive credited forced rotation through unfamiliar functions for building the kind of total-system view and judgement that no single specialized role tends to generate.

Humans, not machines, solve problems

If machines become better at generating answers, human value shifts toward framing problems, challenging assumptions, interpreting tradeoffs, and making decisions under uncertainty. In other words, the future supply chain leader may look less like a data analyst and more like a sage strategist who leverages judgement and discernment skills.

The executives’ insights point to a small number of practical shifts and they track what the underlying research points to:

• Embed risk directly into core decisions such as sourcing, inventory, and capacity rather than treating it as a separate review process.
• Invest in structural flexibility, not just informational visibility, by building supplier relationships, optionality, and capacity buffers before disruptions occur.
• Redesign roles to emphasize problem framing and decision quality rather than incremental gains in analysis.
• Develop judgment through cross-functional experiences that expose managers to tradeoffs across the system.

Organizations will always need better visibility, stronger governance, and more sophisticated technology. Those investments remain essential.  But resilience ultimately depends on something more fundamental.  When conditions change, information becomes incomplete, and pressure intensifies, someone still has to decide.  The organizations that navigate disruption most effectively will not necessarily be those with the best tools.  They will be the ones with the best judgment.

About the authors

Alex Solis is a global executive with over 30 years of leadership experience across some of the world's most recognized Fortune 100 companies, including Procter & Gamble, The Coca-Cola Company, and Tyson Foods. His career has spanned operations, end-to-end supply chain management, innovation, general management, and corporate strategy across domestic and international markets.

After holding director and officer roles, Alex transitioned to strategy consulting as a Partner and Advisor in Kearney's Global Consumer, Retail, and Strategic Operations Practices. There, he advised C-suite leaders across the consumer-packaged goods, retail, food and beverage, and agribusiness sectors on supply chain resilience, growth strategy, route-to-market transformation, revenue growth management, and capability building. He has also co-authored thought leadership on topics including CPG-retailer collaboration, AI value creation in animal protein, and the U.S. labor shortage.

Today, Alex serves as Executive in Residence for Supply Chain Management at the Sam Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, where he helps connect industry, research, and student development through supply chain education, executive engagement, and applied research initiatives. He is a doctoral candidate in the Doctor of Business Administration program at the University of North Alabama. Alex also serves on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, is a member of the Private Directors Association®, and contributes as a guest lecturer and advisory board member at John Brown University's Soderquist College of Business.

Rodney Thomas, Ph.D. is co-Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Business Logistics and a professor in the Department of Supply Chain Management in the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.

SC
MR