Chain Reaction Ep. 8: Breaking Bottlenecks, Building Resilience

Paul Brooks, Supply Chain Veteran with 40 years of experience, offers perspective that only comes from watching supply chains evolve across decades. He's seen everything: manual planning, mainframe systems, ERP implementations, cloud platforms, AI integration. One constant: bottlenecks always exist. You fix one and another emerges. The skill isn't eliminating bottlenecks - that's impossible. It's identifying them fast and addressing them before they ripple into customer impact. Paul's experience spans industries and geographies. Common thread: operators who stay ahead of problems do so by paying attention to signals. Slow throughput. Building inventory. Supplier delays. Process friction. These are early indicators. Organisations that notice and act early tend to get better outcomes than those that react to crises. For supply chain leaders managing complex operations, Paul's conversation is a masterclass in operational thinking. It covers how to structure operations for visibility into bottlenecks. How to think about trade-offs when you fix one problem but risk creating another. What questions to ask about your supply chain to understand where pressure is building. Paul's long experience gives his perspective weight - these aren't theories, they're patterns he's watched emerge repeatedly across different contexts and scales.