RISE to Resilience: A New Index to Measure Supply Chain Strategic Resilience

In today’s increasingly complex and unpredictable global economy, ensuring supply chain resilience is more crucial than ever. Despite its importance, most companies rely on intuition rather than a clear, measurable understanding of how resilient their supply chains are or how strategic adjustments could improve resilience. When discussing supply chain resilience, two levels are often mentioned: operational resilience (short-term, reactive responses to disruptions) and strategic resilience (long-term, proactive planning). While existing research and practices mainly focus on how quickly supply chains recover from disruptions, they lack tools to measure resilience from a forward-looking, strategic perspective and guide future improvements.

To address this gap, we developed the Resiliency Index for Strategic Evaluation (RISE). RISE quantifies supply chain resilience by evaluating three key factors: the complexity of the supply chain structure, the sourcing risks related to the countries of suppliers, and the dependence on specific suppliers or partners. This index serves two main purposes: it provides companies with a benchmark to assess the current resilience of their supply chain, and it evaluates the potential impact of strategic adjustments aimed at improving resilience. We applied RISE to real-world case studies, demonstrating its effectiveness and providing actionable insights for industry leaders.