The Illusion of Redundancy
The squeak of the marker was the only sound. Marcus was drawing our supply chain on the whiteboard, his diagram a confident series of boxes and arrows. Box A: Primary Supplier, Vietnam. Box B: Backup Supplier, Mexico. Two neat, parallel lines connected them to our assembly plant in Ohio. He capped the marker with a satisfying click. “We’re covered,” he said, looking at the 7 of us around the conference table. “If Vietnam has a lockdown, we pivot to Mexico. Redundancy.”
Supplier A
(Vietnam)
Supplier B
(Mexico)
Assembly Plant
(Ohio)
Marcus’s initial, confident supply chain diagram: two separate, resilient paths.
It was a beautiful diagram. Clean. Logical. The kind of thing that gets you a promotion. It was also a complete fantasy.
For 17 minutes, we’d been talking in circles about why both our Vietnamese and Mexican factories had simultaneously halted production of our flagship product. Both cited a sudden, critical shortage of ‘FX-227,’ the specific brilliant blue pigment that made our brand recognizable from 47 feet away. A coincidence, everyone said. A freak event. Black swan. But the silence in the room felt different. It wasn’t the silence of confusion. It was the heavier silence of a truth nobody wanted to voice.
Then, Sarah from procurement, who rarely spoke, asked the question. “Who provides their dye?”
Supplier A
(Vietnam)
Supplier B
(Mexico)
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