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IT'S BEEN SAID you can never be too rich or too thin. The "too thin" part isn't really true about people and it definitely isn't true about supply chains.
As several observers have pointed out recently, it is possible for supply chains to be too lean and if the truth be told, today many of them probably are.
"We've worshipped so much at the altar of lean that for most companies there's no Plan B anymore," says Jeff Karrenbauer, president of Insight Inc., Manassas, VA, which helps companies audit their supply chains. "It's very hard to come up with Plan B in this environment, because having a Plan B implies some level of redundancy.
But we've been so busy cutting every shred of excess that many corporations are now down to the bone."
When does the pursuit of supply chain efficiency become a kind of business anorexia?
When an enterprise loses its resilience.
Resilience is defined as the ability to recover or bounce back from any kind of negative event.