Recovery, Renewal, Resilience

The resilience of construction and infrastructure is highly dependent on reliable, flexible and sustainable supply chains. Learning from the impacts of COVID-19 has identified three key phases for building supply chain resilience. Consider how to:

Secure the supply chain - immediate steps

• Rapidly assess levels of inventory and resource capacity against immediate/emerging demand
• Analyse a range of tactical scenarios and secure essential resources needed to maintain operations
• Evaluate existing relevant contract clauses such as those covering insurances and payment

Recover the supply chain - steps to be taken next

• Refresh business continuity management plans e.g. tested home working, wellbeing protocols, emergency command/control structures

Prepare the supply chain for a post COVID-19 world

• Embed resilience e.g. Has risk increased? Is the supply chain intact?
• Build resilience through
  • keeping redundancy (e.g. increasing stocks, spare capacity, supply competition);
  • creating resistance (e.g. automation);
  • improving recovery (e.g. rapid response protocols)
• Map strategic supply chains to identify possible points of failure in future shocks e.g. an emergency or second wave
• Implement 'smart' forecasting, analytics, and cloud-based systems that provide advanced prediction and indicate disruption