Maps a product's supply chain across tiers, scores concentration risk - supplier, geographic, sub-tier, and logistics - and surfaces qualified alternatives with switching cost and qualification lead time for each critical node. Use when someone asks "where are our single points of failure", "map our supplier dependencies", "what happens if this supplier or region goes down", or is building a resilience, dual-sourcing, or nearshoring plan. Do NOT use for mapping competitors rather than suppliers - use competitive-intelligence instead; for quantifying the financial impact of a disruption scenario, pair with cash-flow-forecast.
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name: Supply Chain Intelligence
description: Maps a product's supply chain across tiers, scores concentration risk - supplier, geographic, sub-tier, and logistics - and surfaces qualified alternatives with switching cost and qualification lead time for each critical node. Use when someone asks "where are our single points of failure", "map our supplier dependencies", "what happens if this supplier or region goes down", or is building a resilience, dual-sourcing, or nearshoring plan. Do NOT use for mapping competitors rather than suppliers - use competitive-intelligence instead; for quantifying the financial impact of a disruption scenario, pair with cash-flow-forecast.
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# Supply Chain Intelligence
Build a clear picture of where a product's inputs come from, where the fragile points are, and what alternatives exist. The costly failure this skill prevents is sub-tier blindness: two "diversified" Tier-1 suppliers who both buy the same component from one factory, discovered only when that factory floods. The goal is resilience, not just cost.
## Inputs to collect
1. **The product or product family** being mapped, and its bill of materials if available.
2. **Known Tier-1 suppliers**: name, location, what they supply, contract terms if shareable.
3. **Buffer inventory**: days of cover per critical input (default assumption if unknown: 2-4 weeks for standard components, less for custom - label it a guess).
4. **Existing second sources** and their qualification status.
5. **Constraints**: regulatory requirements (certifications, country-of-origin rules), qualification budget, and how much disruption downtime costs per day - even a rough figure changes the prioritization.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Map the supply chain by tier
- **Tier 1**: direct suppliers.
- **Tier 2+**: their suppliers, and so on toward raw materials.
Most catastrophic disruptions originate below Tier 1, so push visibility as deep as sources allow: supplier disclosures, import/customs records, industry reports, certification databases. For each node capture: what it supplies, location, capacity share, and substitutability. Where visibility ends, draw the boundary explicitly on the map - an unmapped tier is a risk finding in itself.… load the full skill through Skill Me