For supply chains, the pandemic has brought unprecedented levels of disruption. The specific confluence of events was beyond anybody’s ability to foresee. But, at least in a general sense, everyone should have expected something like the year that just passed to happen.
Risks of severe stress and even failure are built into modern supply chains — unintentionally, but they were there, for decades, for everyone to see. The very idea of a globalized “supply chain” is at least in part defined by risk.