A Big Ship Ran Aground and the World is All Atwitter

“The Suez mishap caps a year of extraordinary tumult for companies involved in moving goods around the world. What began in early 2020 with shortages of personal protective equipment … later morphed into semiconductor shortages that idled major General Motors and Ford plants. A beached container ship choking one of the world’s vital maritime routes only adds a random note of bad luck to this serial supply chain nightmare.” – The Washington Post, March 27.

The Twitter crowd may have found the Evergiven’s grounding in the Suez Canal a days-long diversion, but those of us who live and breathe supply chain have been grinding our teeth in our sleep over the stress.

And not for the first time. Remember Eyjafjallajökull? The Icelandic volcano that shut down European air travel from April 15 to 23, 2010?

I won’t further disturb your sleep by listing similar disruptions because they happen constantly, and we can’t stop them. We can’t predict them, for the most part. We can’t really plan for them, as we don’t know when, where, or at what scale they’ll occur. We simply have no control over every day’s potential for supply chain catastrophes.

While the Evergiven is afloat once again, it leaves in its wake a series of supply chain disruptions that will be felt for weeks or months, as a huge number of ships have been piled up in the Arabian and Mediterranean Seas, and costs of the disruption are estimated at $10 billion and counting.

We can’t predict events like this – but we can be better prepared.

ACSIS believes every organization must have 100% visibility into their supply chains. This includes the parts of the supply chain that are not under their direct control such as manufacturing partners, subcontractors and other value-added service providers. The key message is don’t stop improving your view into the supply chain until you’re at 100% end to end visibility. And yes, it’s possible with proven solutions from ACSIS that are providing supply chain visibility at companies around the world.

With 100% supply chain visibility, you can quickly assess the potential impact of every supply chain disruption and be prepared to take swift action to mitigate supply chain disruptions the moment they occur. You can preserve your company’s revenues and even enhance your market position as your competitors stumble.

We may still be just a shipwreck, earthquake, pandemic, typhoon, cyber attack, etc., away from a massive supply chain headache. But ACSIS can help you stand poised to address them quickly, minimizing the impact on your business. Making your supply chain truly visible is why we exist.