Why the supply chain resilience business case keeps failing... and what to do differently
In conversation with Simon Geale, SVP at Proxima
One of the things I hear most consistently from senior supply chain leaders is a particular kind of frustration: everyone in their organisation agrees that resilience matters, and yet when budget decisions are made, resilience investment keeps losing out to projects with cleaner, shorter-term returns. The conversation that follows is my attempt to press on why that gap persists and what supply chain leaders can actually do about it.
Simon Geale is SVP at Proxima and lead author of the firm's Global Sourcing Risk Index, an annual analysis of supply risk across the world's major trading economies, developed in collaboration with Oxford Economics. He works with chief procurement officers and supply chain leadership teams on exactly the strategic questions that practitioners find hardest to resolve internally.
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The agreement in principle that never becomes investment
The first thing I put to Simon was the pattern I keep observing: resilience has become almost universally accepted as a priority in theory, while in practice the budget approvals continue to tell a different story.
His diagnosis is precise. "Put yourself in the shoes of a grocer operating on a 1 to 2% margin. How much wiggle room is there in that P&L to invest in the infrastructure and new supply arrangements that it would take to take 100% of risk out of your supply chain? The answer is: there isn't."
Secondary supply arrangements typically add 10 to 15% to cost, sometimes more. Real-time visibility systems across strategic routes and suppliers run to millions for any organisation of scale. For a business where the entire operating margin is 1 to 2%, those numbers don't simply fail a cost-benefit test... they look, on their face, impossible to approve. The rational default has been to assume that if a disruption event hits, everyone in the sector will be in the same position, and you'll back yourself to recover faster than the competition. That logic held for a long time.
Oliver Wyman's 2025 supply chain resilience survey captures the resulting paradox neatly: 80% of respondents consider their supply chains resilient, yet only 4% plan to increase resilience budgets, and more than a third expect to cut them. Organisations feel confident and exposed at the same time, and the budget decisions are consistently reflecting the former rather than the latter.
The framing shift that changes the conversation
Simon draws a distinction that gets to the heart of why resilience investment is gaining traction in some boardrooms and not others. It came from a conversation he had with a chief risk officer at a major financial institution.
"He said: the shift in my world is that we are now treating resilience as a strategic investment in capability. If we look at resilience as a cost, it's really hard to justify: we're always adjusting against a 1% P&L. But if it happens to me and I get caught out versus the competition, I lose the trust of my customer. And that's really hard and expensive to win back."
Reframing resilience from a cost line to a strategic investment in competitive advantage changes who the conversation is with, what success looks like, and over what time horizon the return is measured. It also changes the sponsor: a CFO who won't approve a resilience cost will sometimes approve a strategic capability investment in the same breath, if the business case is constructed to speak to what they care about.
How to make the internal case
This is where I pressed hardest, because the gap between the strategic argument and the internal approval process is exactly where supply chain leaders consistently get stuck. "Everyone agrees in principle," I said to Simon, "but the projects that get green-lighted are the ones that are easy to calculate because they lift revenue or cut cost, and the ROI is visible within a planning horizon. Resilience is a much harder sell. If you're a supply chain director who believes the case you've just made, how do you take it to a budget holder?"
His answer centres on presentation rather than analysis. "Your job, ultimately, is to put the case. And if you put the case properly, you can walk in and say: here is the range of answers. This option doesn't protect us against X, Y and Z. This option does, at this cost. All you can do is present choices, with explicit trade-offs."
He illustrated the point with an example of a procurement leader who moved from an organisation where resilience and sustainability were deeply embedded, to one where those topics were actively and vociferously deprioritised at executive level. Same individual, same capability, entirely different context. The lesson is straightforward: the business case has to be built for the organisation in front of you, not an idealised version of it.
That observation connects directly to something I notice across the supply chain leaders I work with: the ones who make progress on resilience investment are rarely the ones with the strongest analytical case. They are the ones who have understood what their CFO is actually worried about (margin compression, customer retention, investor scrutiny) and translated the resilience argument into that language.
Near-shoring is not de-risking, it's risk redistribution
The Proxima Global Sourcing Risk Index, developed with Oxford Economics across 30 economies and eight risk dimensions, surfaces a finding that challenges one of the dominant assumptions of recent supply chain strategy. The conventional logic of the last five years has been that moving supply away from China toward Turkey or Mexico reduces exposure. The data suggests it often just redistributes it.
"Turkey and Mexico came out near the top of our risk index across ten dimensions and they are the two countries benefiting most from the near-shoring agenda," Simon explains. "If you moved to a Turkish supplier five years ago, you got a good price. But you may not have mapped the price volatility, the hyperinflation exposure, the human rights risk profile. Suddenly your cost structure and your brand risk look very different from what you approved."
The broader principle is the one worth holding: near-shoring decisions driven primarily by geopolitical optics, without a structured assessment of the destination's risk profile, tend to swap familiar risks for less understood ones. The work is not to avoid these markets, as many are genuinely strong industrial centres with real competitive advantages, but to go in with visibility of what you are taking on.
Where to start when the full solution is out of reach
I asked Simon for a realistic starting point for organisations that accept the direction of travel but cannot fund the full resilience infrastructure now. His response is worth quoting directly, because it resists the temptation to describe a future state that most organisations cannot afford.
"Practically, most organisations are not going to be able to invest in the systems they need right now. They have to wait for utility-grade solutions that are affordable." That is not defeatist, it is an honest account of the art of the possible.
His sequencing has three steps, each one a precondition for the next. First, understand the data your own business and direct suppliers are already producing. Most organisations do not have visibility of it, let alone a plan to use it. Second, identify which external data sources could improve sourcing and operational decisions (risk indices, geopolitical signals, commodity price movements) and work out how to access and act on them. Third, and only then, address the capability question: how do your teams need to develop to use that data to make better decisions routinely?
Get your own house in order. Build the extension. Then go and live in it day to day.
It is a deliberately unglamorous frame, and that is the point. The organisations that will have meaningfully better supply chain resilience in three years are not waiting for the perfect system or the transformational budget. They are building the data foundation now, using what they can afford, and making the business case in the language their CFO actually speaks.
Simon Geale is SVP at Proxima. The Global Sourcing Risk Index, developed in collaboration with Oxford Economics, is available at proximagroup.com.