Michael Campbell, CEO at Fusion Risk Management.
For manufacturers, disruption is a constant business condition, not an occasional challenge. This is one reason why 74% of industry leaders now see resilience as driving growth, rather than managing risk, according to a 2026 World Economic Forum survey.
Organizations have invested heavily in capabilities like resilience planning, incident response and continuity strategies after shocks tied to the pandemic, geopolitical instability, cyberattacks, labor shortages and supply chain volatility. Yet every disruption reminds us that resilience remains an evolving challenge.
Mature continuity plans answer a different question than what executives now face: not whether they can execute a response, but whether they can make the right decisions fast enough, with enough visibility, before the response window closes.
My organization’s analysis of our 4,571 conversations with organizations in financial services, insurance, life sciences, manufacturing and retail found that concerns around incident response and reporting have declined since 2021, suggesting progress in resilience planning. However, recurring disruption events continue to expose vulnerabilities that many organizations have yet to identify or address.
The next generation of operational disruptions will look very different from those that organizations have learned to manage.
Manufacturers are now operating inside deeply interconnected ecosystems where risks cascade rapidly across suppliers, platforms, systems and operational environments. Many existing resilience playbooks were designed for more linear, predictable disruptions, while emerging threats are far more dynamic.
AI-driven incidents, SaaS outages, IT/OT convergence and fragile supply chain dependencies are creating operational exposure that many organizations struggle to map or model. In manufacturing, resilience must evolve from a compliance-driven exercise into a core strategic capability.
The Blind Spots Created By Confidence
A major risk organizations face today is mistaking progress in response planning for future readiness. Even organizations with mature programs continue to uncover gaps when faced with new or complex disruption scenarios.
While most manufacturers have established procedures for severe weather, facility outages, supplier delays, ransomware or transportation interruptions, many still lack visibility into how interconnected modern operations have become.
A disruption affecting a single cloud platform, software provider, logistics partner or third-party supplier can quickly ripple across production schedules and workforce operations.
Similarly, the convergence of IT and OT systems has improved efficiency and visibility, but it has also expanded operational risk. An issue that once may have been isolated to enterprise systems can now directly impact physical production environments. AI-powered systems are also introducing operational dependency that organizations may not yet fully understand.
Many resilience strategies still rely on static risk assessments, annual reviews and qualitative vendor evaluations that cannot keep pace with today’s shifting operational landscape.
The Supply Chain Visibility Problem
Supply chain leaders face a difficult challenge because operational exposure often extends far beyond direct suppliers.
Manufacturers may have visibility into Tier-1 vendors, but disruption increasingly originates deeper within the supply chain ecosystem through dependencies that organizations cannot easily see or measure.
If a critical supplier fails today, many organizations still struggle to answer foundational operational questions quickly. Traditional vendor risk management was not designed to answer these questions at operational speed. Most assessments remain point-in-time exercises disconnected from operational continuity impact. That disconnect becomes dangerous during fast-moving disruption events.
Manufacturing organizations need resilience strategies capable of mapping supplier and vendor dependencies directly to operational services, production processes and customer outcomes. They also must understand how operational failures cascade across the enterprise before an event occurs.
Why Resilience Is A Competitive Differentiator
Gartner found that supply chain leaders “who proactively plan and build functional resilience are nearly 3.5 times more likely to be high performers.”
Manufacturers that recover faster from disruption events protect revenue, maintain customer commitments, minimize downtime and preserve market confidence more effectively than competitors that rely on reactive response models.
That starts with asking the right questions. Instead of focusing solely on whether a supplier, application or facility is considered “critical,” leaders should understand the consequences if that resource becomes unavailable tomorrow, asking:
• What is impacted?
• What is the financial exposure?
• What breaks next?
• What should be prioritized first?
Most manufacturers can activate a response. Far fewer can answer these questions at the speed executives and boards now require.
Resilience leaders should also challenge existing continuity plans. While many organizations conduct exercises involving natural disasters, cyberattacks or shortages, testing remains limited by the time, cost and operational disruption that human-involved exercises require.
Many scenarios are therefore tested only a handful of times each year, leaving hidden vulnerabilities and complex interdependencies undiscovered. Even fewer organizations have evaluated the impact of a major SaaS outage, an AI-driven system failure or a disruption that simultaneously affects IT and operational technology environments.
Preparing For The Next Generation Of Disruption
As operational ecosystems become more connected, resilience must advance beyond siloed program management toward an integrated model where dependencies are mapped, failure scenarios are pre-built and executive decisions are supported by current data rather than annual assessments.
The organizations making this transition are redesigning what resilience produces: not documentation, but decision capability.
That means breaking down silos between supply chain management, IT, cybersecurity, operations, risk management and executive leadership; improving visibility into dependencies across digital and physical environments; and moving from reactive response planning toward proactive scenario modeling and operational impact analysis.
Manufacturing leaders can stress-test their current posture with one exercise: Identify the five suppliers, platforms or service providers whose simultaneous or sequential failure would have the greatest operational impact. For each, answer the four questions above without consulting a plan document, using only what the organization can surface at decision speed.
This will reveal visibility and decision infrastructure gaps, and they are where the next generation of resilience investment should go.
Resilience belongs in strategic business planning, not as a parallel risk function. Technology investments, supplier decisions and acquisition diligence should all carry an explicit assessment of how they change the organization’s dependency exposure and decision capability under stress.
The next era of operational resilience entails viewing resilience as an operational capability that enables growth, protects customer relationships and creates competitive advantage. Manufacturers cannot eliminate disruption entirely, but they can create organizations that respond faster, adapt more effectively and make better decisions under pressure.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
