While the pandemic was unprecedented in both its scope and impact, it also gave us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to understand how pressures at every stage of a major disruption affected supply chains. The 2024 study pulled five years’ worth of data from before, during, and after the pandemic to give us rare insights, and the learnings we gathered from this data will help leaders make better decisions and guide their companies through future disruptions.

The research allowed us to identify specific opportunities to increase resilience, particularly by leveraging AI-driven demand sensing to improve forecast accuracy, manage product assortment, and use multi-echelon inventory optimization to better manage stock levels in volatile times. These findings can be applied to long-term strategic solutions — such as making investments in planning and forecasting intelligence — but will also be helpful for companies that need to improve their daily operations to help them outperform their competitors.