A decade of disruption: Why global supply chains are still fragile (blog 1 of 4)

Supply chain resilience series - blog 1 of 4.

If you are working in supply chain management, procurement, operations, or logistics - in pharma, life sciences, or food and beverage - the events of the past decade have likely touched your organisation directly. This post maps the disruption landscape and explains why the fundamental vulnerabilities that caused it have not gone away.

From efficiency obsession to resilience imperative

For decades, the dominant logic of supply chain management was cost optimisation: minimise inventory, consolidate suppliers, extend reach for cheaper inputs, and run as lean as possible. It worked - until it didn't.

The 2018 China-US trade war was the first significant signal. Tariffs on large volumes of goods forced companies to urgently re-evaluate sourcing strategies that had taken years to build. Costs increased significantly for producers and consumers alike. But for many, the response was adaptation within the existing model rather than a structural rethink.

COVID-19: The avalanche

The COVID-19 pandemic didn't just disrupt supply chains - it exposed every assumption they were built on simultaneously. Lockdowns and factory closures created production shortages across categories. Consumer behaviour shifted with unprecedented speed. Global trade contracted sharply, with foreign direct investment falling by nearly 50%.

A single global health event revealed that the most cost-efficient supply chain is often the most brittle one.

For process industries, the consequences were not abstract. Pharmaceutical manufacturers couldn't source active pharmaceutical ingredients. Food and beverage producers faced packaging shortages, raw material delays, and distribution breakdowns simultaneously. The organisations that had invested in supplier diversity and safety stock weathered the storm significantly better than those that hadn't.

The Ever Given: A single ship, a global lesson

In March 2021, at the height of pandemic disruption, the container vessel Ever Given grounded in the Suez Canal and blocked one of the world's most critical shipping lanes for six days. Goods valued at approximately £9.6 billion per day were held up. The total estimated negative impact reached around £79.6 billion.

What made the Ever Given particularly instructive was its ripple effect: shipping lanes with no direct connection to the Suez route also experienced delays and cost spikes. Tied-up vessels and containers reduced global capacity across the board. The incident demonstrated, in stark terms, that modern supply chains are so interconnected that a single point of failure anywhere can trigger effects everywhere.

War, climate, and persistent disruption

The Russia-Ukraine war, beginning in February 2022, disrupted global energy and food commodity chains. Severe drought reduced Panama Canal capacity from 2022 to 2023, creating backlogs of up to 21 days and motivating shippers to reroute - only to find those alternative routes then blocked by the Red Sea conflict in late 2023.

These events did not occur in isolation. They compounded. Each one hit supply chains that were already under stress from the last, with organisations that had not yet fully recovered from COVID-19 disruption now absorbing new shocks.

In April 2025, US tariff implementations sent global supply chains into renewed disruption. The announcement alone triggered a surge of pre-tariff imports, affecting not only supply chains but global inflation rates. As of early 2026, the full impact is still unfolding.

Don't overlook the digital dimension

Physical supply chain disruption gets most of the attention, but the digital dimension is equally critical. In 2017, the NotPetya ransomware attack left Maersk - one of the world's largest container shipping companies - significantly impaired for weeks, with full recovery taking approximately three months. By 2025, 283 ransomware attacks on transport and logistics firms were reported in a single year.

With global supply chains dependent on digital infrastructure for everything from order management to customs clearance to real-time tracking, cybersecurity is not a separate IT problem. It is a supply chain resilience problem.

Why the vulnerabilities persist

The disruption of the past decade has not fundamentally changed the structure of global supply chains. Most organisations have made incremental adjustments - some nearshoring, some supplier diversification, some safety stock additions - but the underlying architecture of extended, complex, globally distributed supply chains remains largely intact.

The threats have not stabilised either. Geopolitical tension in the South China Sea, ongoing trade policy volatility, AI-driven economic disruption, and accelerating climate events all represent credible near-term risks to supply chain continuity.

The question is no longer whether your supply chain will face disruption. It is whether you will be ready when it does.

What comes next

Understanding the disruption landscape is the starting point. The next step is moving from awareness to action - specifically, from a reactive supply chain posture to an anticipatory one.

In the next post in this series, we explore the first practical step every organisation can take, regardless of size or budget: mapping your supply chain to understand where your real vulnerabilities lie.

Next in the series: Mapping your supply chain - where to start when you don't know what you don't know. Download the full NIRAS whitepaper on supply chain resilience below.