by https://www.wired.com/story/supply-chain-crisis-data/
“We used to occasionally have black swan events,” says Richard Wilding, professor of supply chain strategy at Cranfield University in the UK, referring to rare and hard-to-predict occurrences that have major impacts. “The problem at the moment is we have a whole flock of black swans coming at us.” Wilding says managing a supply chain used to involve 80 percent dealing with predictability and 20 percent coping with surprises, numbers that have now flipped. And he says a growing number of companies are now using tools that provide greater visibility into the flow of goods, and which can sometimes predict potential choke points. “
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“In a notable shift, Chinese president Xi Jinping told a meeting of the Politburo last week that China must “minimize the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development,” according to an official transcript. This is already translating into a less all-or-nothing approach to containing the virus, with Shanghai, for example, so far avoiding a full lockdown in favor of localized restrictions. Shih says the key challenge in trying to manage supply chain risk by mining data is that there are inevitable blindspots. “There are so many different players in the chain,” he says. This complexity, he adds, makes it hard to gather and synthesize all the data needed to build a complete picture.”
