Supply Chain

The supply chain is consists of millions of adjacent link relationships connected in series for each and every product.  When the world went into lockdown I predicted there would be severe supply chain issues because there is no common or defined set of processes for how it operates.  The process is organic from the manufacture of component parts, to transportation, to the final consumer.   The possible paths for product flow are truly unlimited.  These binary (adjacent) commitments are constantly being renegotiated and forecasts for millions of piece parts are being tweaked constantly.  Buyers and sellers come and go.  But at no time in history has the entire world stopped, which required all adjacent supply chain relationships to be checked or renegotiated at the same time!  Millions of agreements up and down the supply chain were reset and because everyone is doing it at the same time there are no reliable anchor points.  This is complicated by the fact that most players in the chain think of themselves as the end of the chain and they only have an understanding of the adjacent links.  It’s the responsibility of other links to negotiate with their adjacent links. No single person knows the entire chain for their product which makes it impossible to control using traditional hierarchical management models.  It becomes impossible to forecast because homeostasis has been lost.  Panic hoarding makes makes the forecasting challenge even worse.  This  massive organic system, dependent on millions of individuals and 100’s of millions of binary agreements, has grown and evolved in micro steps over 100’s of years and it will take many years to restore homeostasis.