Retailers are being held back from essential supply chain transformation by outdated decision-making methods, according to new research from Kallikor.
The “Deciding in the Dark” report surveyed 200 senior retail supply chain leaders across the U.K. and U.S. and found that fewer than 1 in 5 major strategic decisions achieve their intended objectives.
The research reveals a growing gap between the scale of decisions being made and organizations’ ability to evaluate their impact across interconnected supply chain operations.
Nearly 9 in 10 leaders expect to deliver at least one step-change initiative in the next 12 months, spanning network redesign, automation and service transformation. However, many are doing so without confidence in how those decisions will perform across the wider system.
Complexity and Lack of Visibility Are Driving Failure
As supply chains become more interconnected, leaders are increasingly unable to assess decisions both strategically and operationally at the same time:
- Under two-thirds (63.5%) say they are unable to evaluate decisions both end-to-end and in operational reality.
- Ninety-two percent report unintended performance trade-offs emerging elsewhere in the system following major decisions.
This lack of visibility is contributing directly to underperformance. Many initiatives require significant rework, are scaled back or fail to deliver as intended.
Mark Simpson, former chief supply chain officer for Asda, said, “The sorts of decisions involved in supply chain transformations rarely fail in a clean, obvious way. What I’ve seen is that the impact shows up somewhere else in the business, often only after you’ve already committed. The challenge is moving the business forward, without creating unintended consequences you couldn’t see at the point of decision. And in many organizations, that comes back to how those decisions are evaluated. The approaches haven’t kept pace with the complexity of the systems they’re trying to change.”
Reputational Risk Is Slowing Progress
The report found reputational pressure is increasingly shaping strategic decision-making:
- Ninety percent of leaders report concerns about reputational risk.
- Sixty percent rank personal or reputational risk among the top barriers to making major decisions.
Jonathan Barrett, CEO of Kallikor, said, “Supply chain leaders are being asked to make decisions of a different order to what came before, but the tools available to them have not kept pace. They were built for a simpler, more stable operating environment. Leaders are being underserved by what exists, and our research shows the consequences of that gap are significant. This is not a leadership problem. It is a decision environment problem, and it is one that is entirely solvable.”
The findings point to growing demand for more integrated approaches that allow retailers to test decisions in realistic, system-wide conditions before implementation.
