Last week, we looked at why operational resilience increasingly depends on process visibility rather than just contingency planning. That argument gets sharper, not softer, when you look at how little visibility most enterprises actually have into their own supply chains today — even after several years of supposedly learning the lessons of pandemic-era disruption.

‍

The Visibility Gap Hasn’t Closed — It’s Stalled

McKinsey’s most recent annual survey of supply chain leaders, covering 100 organizations across sectors globally, found that the majority of companies understand their supply chain risks only up to tier one — meaning they have reasonable visibility into their direct suppliers but limited to no visibility into the suppliers behind those suppliers, where most disruptions actually originate.

‍

More troubling: McKinsey’s longitudinal comparison shows that as memory of pandemic-era disruption faded, so did investment in deeper risk visibility. The share of companies reporting risk awareness at tier two and beyond actually fell in 2023 and 2024, and even with renewed disruption from tariffs and geopolitical volatility, most organizations’ risk capabilities still haven’t returned to where they were in 2022.

‍

That’s a genuinely uncomfortable finding. It suggests that visibility investment in supply chains tracks crisis memory rather than structural risk — companies invest when disruption is fresh and painful, then quietly let that investment lapse once the immediate crisis passes, even though the underlying fragility never went away.

‍

‍

Why Tier-One Visibility Isn’t Enough

The instinct to focus visibility efforts on direct (tier-one) suppliers is understandable — that’s the relationship procurement actually manages, negotiates with, and has contractual leverage over. But it’s also where the least disruption risk actually originates.

‍

A tier-one supplier’s ability to deliver depends on their suppliers, and those suppliers’ suppliers, in a chain that often runs three, four, or five tiers deep before reaching the actual point of raw material extraction or component manufacturing. When McKinsey’s research consistently shows that most disruptions originate in these deeper tiers — the ones organizations have essentially no visibility into — it means most supply chain risk management is structurally aimed at the wrong layer of the problem.

‍

This isn’t a new insight, but it’s one that keeps getting deprioritized whenever the immediate crisis fades. McKinsey’s separate analysis on supply chain resilience has found that comprehensive tier-one supplier visibility, while improving, still leaves the deeper-tier blind spot largely unaddressed across the industry — confirming that this gap is persistent rather than a one-time finding.

‍

‍

What Process Visibility Actually Means in Practice

Process visibility, in the sense that actually reduces risk, isn’t a dashboard that shows whether a purchase order was issued on time. It’s the ability to answer questions like: which of our active suppliers are dependent on a single sub-supplier with no qualified backup? Which categories have concentration risk in a single geographic region currently facing disruption? If a key supplier’s plant goes offline tomorrow, how many of our purchase orders, contracts, and downstream commitments does that actually touch?

‍

Most organizations can’t answer these questions quickly because the data needed to answer them lives in different systems, different formats, and often different departments — procurement holds the supplier relationship data, but risk signals about that supplier’s own supply chain rarely flow back into the same system where sourcing decisions get made.

‍

‍

The Connection to Everyday Procurement Operations

This is where supply chain resilience and the more routine parts of procurement technology — supplier onboarding, spend analytics, supplier performance dashboards — turn out to be more connected than they first appear. A supplier record that’s accurate, current, and centralized at onboarding is also the foundation for any later risk assessment of that supplier. Spend analytics that track category-level concentration aren’t just a cost-management tool — they’re also a resilience tool, because they’re the fastest way to see that 70% of a critical category’s spend flows through suppliers in a single region.

‍

Velocious’s Supplier Experience and Spend Analytics modules — real-time PO visibility, supplier performance dashboards, and spend analysis by category, supplier, plant, and time period — exist for cost and collaboration reasons primarily, but they double as the early-warning infrastructure McKinsey’s research argues most organizations are still missing. Concentration risk in a spend category is visible in the same dashboard a category manager already uses to track savings. A supplier’s performance degradation shows up in the same system tracking their day-to-day delivery, well before it becomes a crisis serious enough to warrant a dedicated risk review.

‍

‍

The Real Lesson

The organizations that weathered recent supply disruption best weren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated risk models — they were the ones who had built visibility into the everyday operating rhythm of procurement, so that early warning signs surfaced naturally rather than depending on a periodic risk audit to catch them. McKinsey’s data suggests most enterprises are still investing in resilience reactively, in bursts triggered by the last crisis, rather than structurally, as a permanent feature of how procurement operates day to day.

‍

Given that supply chain disruption has become, by McKinsey’s own framing, a persistent condition of global business rather than an occasional event, that reactive pattern is itself the risk most worth addressing.

‍

Source: McKinsey & Company, “How Global Disruption Is Reshaping Manufacturing Supply Chains” and related annual supply chain leader survey research, 2025–2026 (survey of 100 global supply chain leaders).