Resilience Is Designed Through Structure, Not Intention
Volatility is now a structural feature of the environment in which supply chains operate. For many supply chain leaders, that creates a persistent challenge. They are expected to protect service levels, manage cost, reduce working capital and respond to disruption, often without full authority over the organisational levers that shape those outcomes.
Chris Bassano’s experience across industrial manufacturing and building products networks provides a grounded perspective on how these tensions can be addressed. His work has spanned inventory crises, operating model redesign, large-scale planning implementation and financial reset. Across these contexts, the common thread is not technology. It is structural clarity.
One early transformation took place during the 2008 shipping boom. Lead times in shipbuilding had stretched dramatically. Inventory was rising sharply and physical space in the factory was saturated with castings and unfinished components. MRP had effectively become detached from operational reality because internal throughputs and takt times were no longer synchronised with customer timelines.
The intervention required a full reimplementation of MRP and a detailed ABC and XYZ analysis of inventory. Production sequencing was reconnected to the actual build schedules of shipyards. Over time, inventory levels stabilised and returned to expected turns. The core issue had not been a lack of effort or intent. It had been a loss of synchronisation between demand, supply and production.
Later, as Group Supply Chain Director at BMI, the scale of complexity increased significantly. The business operated more than one hundred plants across Europe, with dozens of ERP systems, no formal demand management role, limited reporting visibility and no established S&OP discipline. Inventory was high and cash pressure was mounting.
Two redesign efforts had to happen in parallel.
The Physical Network, Raw Economics & Operating Models
The first concerned the physical network. This meant understanding end-to-end economics across raw materials, conversion and logistics, reducing plant footprint, and increasing cross-border flexibility so that markets were not overly dependent on single facilities.
The second concerned the operating model. Who owns demand? Where does planning sit relative to country P&Ls? How does supply chain interact with commercially driven managing directors? Without clarity on these questions, no amount of system investment would have delivered sustainable change.
The network gradually evolved from largely country-isolated operations towards significantly higher cross-border flows. This increased flexibility and improved resilience. However, that flexibility depended on governance. Planning, logistics and warehousing were positioned as an integrating layer between commercial demand and manufacturing supply. Chris describes this role as conducting the organisation. It did not control every function, but it ensured coherence between them.
A critical breakthrough came with demand management. At the outset, there was no role with the word demand in the title. Forecasting responsibility sat diffusely within commercial teams. Chris built a case for introducing dedicated demand planners in key markets to establish credible demand signals. Once that capability existed, supply plans could be constructed with greater discipline. Production planning stabilised as a result.
Only after these structural foundations were in place did large-scale IBP and ERP implementation make strategic sense. The sequence is instructive. Systems reinforce an operating model. They do not substitute for one.
The CFO as Supply Chain's Key Investment Ally
For many supply chain leaders, the more difficult challenge is not operational design but investment approval. Planning capability, network redesign and inventory optimisation often compete with other capital demands. Unless the case is framed convincingly, proposals stall.
Here the discussion shifts to free cash flow. Inventory is not simply a buffer or an operational metric. It represents cash tied up in the system. Sales leaders tend to focus on revenue. Manufacturing leaders focus on cost. Free cash flow connects service, cost, demand quality and inventory discipline directly to enterprise value.
This is where the relationship with the CFO becomes critical. In Chris’s experience, the CFO is often the executive most attuned to the structural importance of working capital. When inventory reduction is positioned as a marginal efficiency gain, it attracts limited attention. When it is framed as a driver of free cash flow and balance sheet strength, the debate changes. The supply chain leader moves from functional advocate to financial partner.
S&OP, in this context, is not a technical process but a governance mechanism. At BMI, country managing directors were required to present the operational and financial realities of their business on a monthly basis, including inventory performance. That visibility created accountability. Planning decisions were no longer internal to supply chain. They became part of executive dialogue.
Across these experiences, several themes recur. Volatility requires deliberate operating model design. Operating model design depends on credible demand signals and disciplined orchestration between commercial and manufacturing functions. Orchestration must be translated into financial terms, particularly working capital and free cash flow. That translation depends on alignment with the CFO.
Resilience is not achieved through redundancy alone. It is built through structural coherence between network design, governance, planning discipline and financial consequence. Supply chain leaders who can connect these elements are better positioned to influence strategy rather than react to it.
Supply Chain as the Conductor
Supply chain cannot define itself narrowly as a cost centre or as an execution function. Its responsibility is to integrate. That integration is not abstract. It connects commercial intent with operational reality, and operational decisions with financial consequence.
The idea of supply chain as a conductor captures this precisely. A conductor does not play every instrument. Nor do they override the authority of each section. Their role is to ensure timing, balance and coherence. In the same way, supply chain sits between demand and manufacturing, between country P&Ls and group priorities, between service ambition and cash discipline. Without that integrative function, individual parts may perform well in isolation, but the overall system drifts out of sync.
For Chris, resilience is therefore less about adding buffers and more about strengthening alignment. It requires credible demand signals, disciplined planning cadence, transparent inventory visibility and a clear link to free cash flow. It also requires partnership, particularly with the CFO, to ensure that operational decisions are understood in financial terms.
When supply chain leaders adopt this perspective, their influence changes. They move from defending metrics to shaping outcomes. They are no longer reacting to volatility. They are designing a system capable of absorbing it.
That is the role of the conductor.