IN Brief:
- Only 33% of surveyed businesses said they had fully implemented disruption-response strategies.
- Manufacturing footprints remain concentrated in China, Europe, and the UK, with limited diversification elsewhere.
- SCALA is urging wider use of multi-sourcing, risk mapping, contingency warehousing, and stronger systems resilience.
SCALA has warned that many UK businesses remain exposed to disruption because too much activity is concentrated across a small number of sourcing regions, transport routes, systems, and major customer accounts. Its new report, The Resilience Gap, finds that supply chains built for cost and service efficiency are now carrying less room for manoeuvre as geopolitical risk, shipping disruption, energy volatility, cyber incidents, and extreme weather continue to bear down on operations.
The report is based on a July 2025 survey of 21 senior supply chain leaders from businesses with combined turnover of more than £8.43 billion, spanning sectors including electronics, grocery and FMCG, home appliances, and DIY. Just 33% of respondents said they had fully implemented the strategies needed to respond adequately to disruption, while 52% said they had only partially implemented them and 14% had yet to begin. SCALA also found that manufacturing footprints remain heavily concentrated in China, Europe, and the UK, with only a secondary presence across other South East Asian markets.
The commercial exposure runs beyond sourcing geography. Nearly half of respondents said more than half of their sales came from their top three customers, a level of concentration that can turn an operational problem into an immediate revenue problem. The report also points to weaknesses in systems continuity: more than half of businesses said they could not continue sales order processing or purchasing if their main system failed, while only around two-thirds of warehouse systems could continue operating to some extent on back-up arrangements. Chris Clowes, executive director at SCALA, said many supply chains had been shaped for a more stable trading environment, adding that businesses now needed to identify where they had “too few options” before the next shock tested the network.
SCALA is recommending a more structural response to resilience, rather than a narrow focus on contingency plans. That includes dual or multi-sourcing of critical components, broader geographic diversification, end-to-end risk mapping across suppliers and transport routes, secondary manufacturing or assembly options, stronger cybersecurity, and contingency warehousing with adaptable transport arrangements. The report suggests that for many businesses the next phase of resilience work will come down to redesigning network assumptions that once looked efficient, but now look brittle.
