Pre-COVID Versus Now: What Supply Chain Teams Actually Won (And Lost)

Supply chain used to be the invisible engine. You didn't think about it until it broke. Before the pandemic, most organizations treated supply chain management like they treated electricity in the office: you assumed it would work, and if it didn't, you called someone to fix it. That invisibility had a cost. It made supply chain easy to cut when budgets tightened. It meant supply chain leaders were often the first people in the room when finance wanted to trim the fat.

The pandemic changed that calculus overnight. Suddenly, supply chain wasn't invisible anymore. It was the problem keeping your company from operating. It was the reason your customers couldn't get what they ordered. It was the thing every executive was asking about in the board meeting.

Six years later, we're not back to normal. And that's the thing most people get wrong when they talk about supply chain recovery. We didn't recover to where we started. We evolved into something different. The question worth asking isn't whether supply chain is back to normal. It's what actually changed, what stayed worse, and where the real competitive advantage lies now.

What Got Better: The Strategic Elevation

The most significant shift is organizational positioning. Gartner predicts that by 2025, over 50% of supply chain organisations will have a technology leader reporting directly to the Chief Supply Chain Officer, reflecting the strategic importance of technology integration. That's not a small thing. A decade ago, the technology conversation in supply chain was an afterthought. Now it's a line item on the CSCO's agenda, and it matters to the business strategy.

This elevation came with real resource allocation. In 2025, 82% of supply chain organisations reported an increase in IT spending, highlighting a strong focus on digital transformation, AI, automation, and visibility tools to enhance operational efficiency and resilience. When organizations were panic-hiring and scrambling to manage disruptions in 2021 and 2022, they opened their wallets. And they kept them open. That's unusual for supply chain. Historically, supply chain funding was cyclical. Boom times got investment; downturns got cuts. This time, even as hiring stabilized and the panic subsided, organizations didn't walk away from their supply chain investments.

The talent market tells the same story. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 17% employment growth for logisticians from 2024 to 2034—nearly five times faster than the average for all occupations, translating to approximately 26,400 job openings annually. But the real signal is in specialized roles. Supplier risk management, the discipline that monitors whether your suppliers are stable and compliant, has seen explosive growth. The workforce in the supply chain risk management sector has grown by approximately 8,000 professionals year-over-year, totaling over 128,800 employees globally. That's the hiring you mentioned seeing. It's real, and it reflects a permanent shift in how organizations think about supply chain stability.

Pre-COVID, supplier risk management existed in many organizations, but it was often bundled into procurement. Now it's its own function, with dedicated budget and staff. The global Supplier Risk Management Market stood at USD 4.1 billion in 2024 and is forecasted to achieve USD 9.1 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 9.6% from 2026 to 2033. That growth trajectory signals where organizations are placing their bets. They're not hedging supplier risk anymore. They're actively managing it.

What Got Worse: The Structural Cost Shift and Fragmentation Problem

But visibility and strategic importance came with a catch. The costs didn't go down. In 2024, U.S. logistics costs reached $2.6 trillion or 8.8% of GDP, with the cost-to-GDP ratio stabilizing at a new baseline of 8.7–8.8%, compared to 7.4–8.0% pre-COVID, suggesting this is a structural shift rather than cyclical. This isn't temporary. This is the new normal.

You can't just-in-time your way out of uncertainty anymore. Just-in-time inventory assumes stability in supplier networks and transportation infrastructure. Neither assumption holds now. Companies are holding more safety stock, maintaining more warehousing capacity, and diversifying their supplier base across geographies. All of that costs money. And it's going to stay expensive because the underlying instability isn't going away.

The other thing that got worse is the technology landscape. This is where the real friction lives. Organizations have spent the last five years trying to see across their supply chains, so they've layered on new systems: planning platforms, risk management tools, visibility platforms, demand sensing tools, control towers. But here's the problem: none of these systems talk to each other the way they should.

Most supply chain technology environments remain fragmented, with ERP, TMS, WMS, and planning systems operating on different data models, update cycles, and integration patterns. Even when each system performs as intended, the combined environment often responds slowly because coordination across systems is limited. Organizations threw money at the visibility problem, and they got a bunch of new information. But they didn't get what they really needed: the ability to act on that information quickly.

The data problem is even more fundamental. Data fragmentation is still a primary constraint on AI value realization, with only 5% able to access their company's spend data instantly in a single system. You're looking at situations where the demand planning tool doesn't talk to the procurement tool, the procurement tool doesn't feed into the inventory system, and the inventory system gives visibility to some suppliers but not others. You've got visibility into fragmented pieces, but not a unified operating model.

That fragmentation creates a secondary problem: organizations are struggling to operationalize their technology investments. Only 14% say AI is fully embedded in their core operations, and 73% would benefit from additional access to training and implementation resources. You can have an AI-powered demand forecast, but if your people don't trust it, or they don't know how to incorporate it into their planning cycle, you've just created another data point on a dashboard nobody uses.

The Maturity Gap

Organizations know they need to improve. In a September 2024 survey, more than half the respondents (56%) said they have used a maturity model to assess their transportation, logistics, or supply chain processes and capabilities. That's a significant increase from five years ago. But awareness of the problem and the ability to solve it are different things.

The organizations that are winning are the ones that have moved past the "buy more technology" phase and into the "integrate what we have" phase. They're not chasing the next shiny platform. They're connecting the ones they already own. They're teaching their people how to use AI-assisted decision-making in their existing workflows. They're moving from reactive crisis management to something that looks more like a managed operating model.

Real examples show what's possible. Pharmaceutical manufacturer Sanofi now predicts 80% of low-inventory risks with AI, shielding EUR 300 million in revenue. But Sanofi didn't get there by buying one new platform. They got there by integrating their supplier data, their forecast data, and their risk data into a single intelligence model. That's the hard work that comes after the visibility phase.

The Opportunity That Nobody's Talking About Yet

Here's where this gets interesting, and where supplier relationship managers have real leverage. Pre-COVID, supplier conversations were transactional. You negotiated price, terms, and delivery. You didn't have deep visibility into your supplier's operations, and you didn't need it. You just needed them to deliver on time.

Now you have visibility. You can see supplier risk signals months before they become problems. You understand their capacity constraints, their geopolitical exposure, their financial stability. And most organizations are using that visibility to do exactly what they did before: manage risk and negotiate harder.

The real opportunity is in the conversation you could have instead. Once supplier risk management matured enough that it became a specialized function, the door opened for something bigger. Instead of "Here's your risk score, improve it," the conversation becomes "Here's what we're seeing in the market. Here's what we're struggling with. What could we build together that would solve this for both of us?"

That's not innovation through software. That's innovation through partnership. And it's only possible because supply chain finally has enough strategic visibility and maturity to show up to that table as an equal.

The organizations that figure this out first are the ones that will have the most resilient supplier networks in the next five years. Not because they have better risk management tools. Because they've invested in understanding their suppliers deeply enough to co-create solutions.

The Real Play

Supply chain went from invisible to visible. From cost center to strategic function. From negotiated transactions to managed relationships. The costs are higher, the technology is messy, and the maturity gap is real. But the people, the budget, and the organizational positioning are all there.

For supplier relationship managers, the question isn't whether supply chain is finally important. It is. The question is whether you're going to use that importance to just manage risk better, or whether you're going to use it to build something new with your suppliers. That's where the actual leverage is.

What's changed in your supply chain organization since COVID? What's actually gotten easier, and where is the friction still real? I'm building a picture of what the real opportunities look like for supply chain leaders in 2026, and I'd love to hear your perspective.