Report: Supply chain disruptions up 67% in 2020

Supply chain disruptions rose nearly 70% in 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic leading the way as the most damaging event, according to data from supply chain risk monitoring firm Resilinc, released this week.

The data come from Resilinc’s 2020 EventWatch Report, which analyzes information gathered from the company’s EventWatch AI global event monitoring service. The report shows that supply chain disruptions were up 67% year-over-year in 2020, with 83% of disruptive events being “human caused,” the company said. Factory fires and changes in ownership of supplier firms ranked as the top two disruptive event categories.

Although human disruptions—including Covid-19-related events—ranked fifth in terms of the number of event alerts in the Resilinc platform, company leaders said the disruption caused by the pandemic was more damaging than any other type of event in all of 2020.

“Covid-19, and the government policies enacted in response to it, created deeper global impacts, leading Resilinc to designate the event as ‘severe’—the first time in the company’s history ranking an event at that level of impact,” according to the company.

Resilinc issued 6,192 alerts about potential supply chain disruptions to its customers in 2020. Of those, 60% were serious enough to trigger the creation of a “WarRoom”—a virtual platform in the Resilinc dashboard where customers and their suppliers communicate and collaborate to assess and resolve disruptions. WarRoom creation was up 80% year-over-year in 2020, due mainly to pandemic-related threats pushing supply chain teams to develop contingency plans, including finding alternate suppliers.

Resilinc’s database also shows that North America experienced the most disruptions, at 2,935, followed by Asia (1,323), and Europe (1,210).