July 22, 2025 3 Success Tips For Supply Chain Professionals

Become a supply chain detective, use strategic curiosity to tackle trade challenges and help build a more resilient future.

By Robert Cowan, Director, Supply Chain Solutions Development, Avnet Velocity®

Uncertainty seems to be the only constant in today’s ever-evolving supply chain landscape for manufacturing and industry. Geopolitical shifts occur overnight, trade tensions escalate rapidly, and environmental regulations are increasing across regions. Supply chains that once seemed reliable may now face unanticipated complexities.

In the fast-paced world of manufacturing, the instinct to react swiftly—whether it’s re-engineering networks, pivoting suppliers or overhauling strategies—has never been stronger. Yet, in this era of constant disruption, the counterintuitive truth is that sometimes the smartest move is to take a step back and proceed with caution.

Mastering the art of strategic patience is crucial. Building systems robust enough to weather any storm reveals the true winners, who respond intelligently and patiently.

Here are three tips for today’s supply chain professionals to ensure they’re equipped to navigate these complexities: Be more inquisitive, avoid working in silos and make sustainable decisions. Let’s dive into each topic. 

Strategic curiosity

Welcome to the age of the supply chain detective. In a world where tariffs can reshape entire industries overnight, manufacturing professionals are adding magnifying glasses to their toolset.

The new superpower is strategic curiosity, an almost anthropological fascination with understanding the deep structures that support global commerce. To avoid uncertainty, supply chain leaders in manufacturing need to conduct what amounts to forensic investigations into the labyrinthine of networks that power modern industry.

Take a seemingly straightforward question: “Where is this made?” There’s no simple answer. That component sitting on your desk might wear multiple passports—Vietnamese for U.S. customs, Chinese for EU regulators. It depends on arcane transformation thresholds and value-add calculations. This isn’t bureaucratic trivia; it’s the difference between seamless operations and customs purgatory.

The complexity goes deeper. Some supply chain managers operate with tunnel vision, focusing solely on their immediate suppliers while overlooking the sprawling ecosystem that surrounds them. They’re missing an important perspective.

Here’s the simple truth: supply chains are increasingly connected in new ways. A semiconductor hiccup in Taiwan triggers a cascade that eventually affects production lines in Detroit. A labor strike in Bangladesh ripples through networks to empty retail shelves in Manhattan. The interconnectedness isn’t a bug—it’s a feature of our hyper-optimized world.

The winners in this landscape are the ones wielding their curiosity like a scalpel, dissecting their networks layer by layer. They’re asking the hard questions: Where exactly do our mission-critical components get manufactured, tested, packed, warehoused and shipped? Who supplies our suppliers? What are our lifeline trade routes? What happens when—not if—a supply chain node stops operating?

This detective work isn’t optional anymore. It’s table stakes for professional survival in an era where complexity is the only constant.

Technology is the great enabler here. AI-powered analytics can spot hidden vulnerabilities. Digital mapping tools render supply networks in vivid, explorable detail. Machine learning algorithms can predict failures before they happen.

But even the most sophisticated supply chain visibility platform is a paperweight if you lack the curiosity to interrogate its insights. The technology is only as intelligent as the questions we feed it and the data we supply it.

The future belongs to the strategically curious—those who understand that in a world of infinite complexity, the deepest insights come from asking the right questions and collecting the right data.

Breaking down silos

The traditional corporate structure, with its command-and-control hierarchy, doesn’t play well in today’s age of hyperconnected supply chains.

Here’s a reality check: When a single regulatory curveball can simultaneously blindside procurement, logistics, finance and compliance, the “stay in your lane” mentality no longer works. The world moves too fast for permission slips and organization chart protocols.

Take tariff management, the ultimate stress test for siloed thinking. Imagine a new trade restriction drops, and suddenly every department is scrambling in its own bubble. Finance explores cost implications. Logistics pivots to alternative routes. Procurement scrambles for new suppliers. Each team optimizes for its own KPIs while the company burns.

It’s organizational chaos masquerading as efficiency.

The companies winning today have mastered collaboration in new ways. They institutionalized cross-functional collaboration where trade compliance experts interact with finance wizards, IT architects, procurement specialists, sales strategists and logistics masterminds. These are real-time intelligence networks that prevent siloed thinking and uncover opportunities that departmental tunnel vision would miss.

Real magic happens beyond formal structures. The new breed of supply chain professional is fluent across functions and departments. They translate supply chain constraints into financial impacts that make CFOs pay attention. They convert logistics bottlenecks into customer experience stories that resonate with marketing. They understand that a lack of upstream visibility will impact the whole organization.

The winners understand the true advantages of organizational agility.

Building sustainable resilience

The old sustainability playbook focused on carbon footprints and recycling initiatives. Today’s sustainability is about building supply chains that don’t just survive disruption—they thrive on it.

To borrow a term from critical IT systems, the foundation of sustainable supply chain management is what we might call “intelligent redundancy.” This means moving beyond traditional single-sourcing strategies toward dual or multi-sourcing approaches that provide options without creating excessive complexity.

The mission isn’t risk elimination—that can’t happen in our hyperconnected world. It’s about ensuring that when the inevitable disruption hits, you’ve got alternatives queued up and ready to load-balance your operations.

Here’s where it gets interesting: supply chain pros are becoming geopolitical analysts. They’re not just tracking inventory. They’re monitoring diplomatic tensions, regulatory tea leaves and political fault lines. In a world where a single tweet can trigger trade wars, understanding international relations isn’t optional; it’s operational.

The smart money is on scenario planning. What happens when trade relations between two supplier countries implode? How do new environmental regulations reshape your vendor landscape? What if a critical shipping lane goes dark? These aren’t abstract thought experiments; they’re business continuity imperatives.

The most sophisticated organizations utilize advanced analytics to model these scenarios, but the underlying principle remains simple: plan for multiple futures rather than relying solely on a single prediction. This might mean maintaining supplier relationships in different geographic regions, building inventory buffers for critical components, or developing contingency logistics plans.

Long-term planning takes on new importance in this context. Sustainable supply chain management demands thinking beyond quarterly earnings calls and annual planning cycles. Building supplier relationships, developing new sourcing regions, and creating intelligent redundancy systems aren’t sprint projects. They’re marathon investments. Organizations that wait for disruption to start building resilience are condemned to perpetual catch-up mode.

The future belongs to the prepared. In an era where supply chain shocks can topple giants overnight, redundancy isn’t just smart. It’s how you win.

The path forward

Forget waiting for things to “return to normal.” Uncertainty, complexity and breakneck technological change aren’t bugs in the current system—they’re features. The sooner supply chain professionals accept this reality, the sooner they can start winning in it.

The survivors in this new landscape will be the strategically curious, the silo-smashers and the resilient architects. They’re the ones who understand that in a world where the only constant is change, adaptability always beats optimization.

This isn’t about throwing efficiency out the window. Cost optimization and operational excellence still matter. They’re just no longer the only metrics that matter. The new scorecard includes flexibility, transparency, collaboration and long-term strategic thinking.

For those with the skills to navigate this chaos, uncertainty transforms into opportunity. Complexity becomes a competitive advantage. Disruption becomes the raw material for building resilient supply chains that not only survive volatility—they thrive on it.

About the Author:
Robert Cowan is Director of Supply Chain Solutions Development for Avnet Velocity® where he and a team of supply chain architects design end-to-end solutions for digital and physical supply networks for organizations throughout the global electronic component ecosystem. Robert has been with Avnet for 12 years. Prior to Avnet, he held positions as a supply chain consultant, project manager and supply chain manager. He has a master’s degree in Logistics, Supply Chain and Project Management from SKEMA Business School in France, is a Project Management Professional (PMP) with the Project Management Institute, and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, UK.

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