Supply Chains

The lines of supply a body actually depends on — what it must be able to see, and what it must be able to survive losing.

A supply chain is the path a thing travels from where it comes from to where it is used, and the people and agreements along it. Every body has them, most bodies cannot draw them, and the ones that cannot are carrying a risk they have never looked at. The first discipline is therefore simply to make them visible: what do we depend on, where does it come from, who is between us and it, and what happens if that line goes (Transparency · System of Systems).

The canon links them to the flow of work rather than to procurement, and that is the useful frame. A line of supply is a Constraint waiting to become the binding one; the chain's slowest or most fragile link governs what the whole can deliver, exactly as in Theory Of Constraints, and the relevant measure is Throughput of The Goal rather than the local efficiency of any link (Critical Path · Flow · Make-Ready Process).

Two further things fall out of seeing them. They carry ethics. A chain is a set of relationships, and what happens at the far end of it — to people, to land, to water — is part of what a body is doing, whether or not it has looked (Omniconsideration · Ecology · Extraction Of Wealth). They carry dependency. A long, cheap, single-threaded chain is efficient until it is not, and a body whose essentials all run through lines it does not control is not sovereign in the way it believes it is (Manufactured Dependency · Sovereignty · Technology Sovereignty · Anti-Fragility).

The repair is not autarky, which is poverty by another name. It is knowing the lines, shortening the critical ones, keeping more than one where the thing is essential, and preferring the local where local is possible (Bioregion · The Locality · Subsidiarity · Fostering Ecosystemic Resource Flows).

Also called: lines of supply Stands on: Economy · Constraint · Throughput · Infrastructure Opens onto: Theory Of Constraints · Critical Path · Flow · Anti-Fragility · Manufactured Dependency · Bioregion · Fostering Ecosystemic Resource Flows · Technology Sovereignty · Pillar III — Sacred Economy and CurrentSee In play: the Room and beyond, when a body maps what it actually depends on; and the plan, when a line of supply turns out to be the binding constraint Sources: Supply Chains (root page, stub — two lines, linking the concept to the critical chain and to Throughput of the Goal) · Theory Of Constraints, Throughput (root pages) · lionsberg.wiki: Supply Chains Open: The root page is a pointer, not a treatment; everything above beyond the critical-chain link is synthesis from general understanding and from the surrounding canon. · The canon spells the neighbour term Critical Chain, which the Field's path vocabulary distinguishes from Critical Path; the stub uses them interchangeably.