If you’re curious about general high level trends and forecasts in the supply chain that are likely to impact specific procurement and supplier management strategies, it’s worth checking out a recent McKinsey Quarterly article (registration required) titled, “Building the Supply Chain of the Future.” The article frames the debate noting that supply chains of today were built for a more perfect world, with “stable, high-volume” production, often in regions with attractive labor-arbitrage opportunities. While this is an assertion I could quibble with — I think many global supply chains were much more fragile from the start than we cared to admit and were often built on partial assumptions around total cost, capacity, price stability, etc. — I do agree that we face more volatility and risk from past supply chain decisions than ever before. But what are companies doing about this risk?

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