Beyond Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea disruptions - ensuring supply chain resilience with process intelligence

Geopolitical disruptions at critical maritime chokepoints - from the Red Sea to the Strait of Hormuz - are no longer outliers - they are a feature of a persistently-destabilized global trade environment. For a fifth of the world’s oil and an equal percentage of the world’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply, the "cost to serve" is under unprecedented pressure. When a major shipping line diverts around the Cape of Good Hope, adding two weeks to transit times and doubling spot rates, most organizations face a dangerous risk of "reaction delay."

This delay isn’t caused by a lack of data, but because organizations can’t align fast enough. According to the 2026 Process Optimization Report — Supply Chain Executive Summary, increasing freight and shipping costs have climbed to the #1 challenge for global operators, followed closely by raw material shortages. And 85 percent of 400 supply chain leaders surveyed admit they urgently need to increase the speed at which they respond to these disruptions.

Supply chains aren’t failing at the macro level - they are breaking in the gaps between dozens of interconnected processes that most teams simply cannot see in time to act. We see this play out across every sector: automotive plants halting production due to component shortages, retailers facing 20 percent increases in delivery costs, and CPG firms struggling with availability constraints. These aren't just logistics failures - they are process failures.

Read more - Supply chain analytics — A playbook for visibility wins

Why planning falls short

Modern planning systems have become significantly more capable, but even the best can only reason using the data and context they're given. The problem isn't the planning engine. It's that a significant portion of supply chain decision-making never makes it into those systems - the constraint documented in a spreadsheet, the supplier negotiation happening over email, the manual workaround that has quietly become standard practice. These hidden process realities create a persistent gap between what the plan assumes and what is actually happening across the network.

The result is a "whack-a-mole" cycle. Supply Chain teams fix a local inventory issue only to inadvertently create a downstream instability in service levels or working capital. This isn't a planning failure. It's a context failure. And that context failure has become a direct blocker for the next generation of AI. While 87 percent of leaders aim to become "agentic enterprises" within three years, 76 percent admit their current processes are holding them back from realizing ROI on AI. AI agents can only work as well as the operational reality they reason against - and today, that reality is still largely invisible.

Without a shared, living understanding of how the supply chain actually runs, companies struggle to scale Enterprise AI because the technology lacks the essential operational context it needs to reason. So that both operators and AI can act with confidence when it matters most. In fact, 82 percent of leaders now agree that AI solutions can only deliver true value if they have the context of how the business runs.

It’s not about having the most efficient linear process - it’s about having more confidence in decisions. We need to stop living in a world of model frameworks and start handling disruptions in real-time.

Closing the gap with process intelligence

To move from reactive firefighting to data-driven resilience, organizations must build a digital twin of business operations. This requires a system-agnostic semantic layer for the supply chain - the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform. It integrates transactional data and operational context with external sources (e.g., supplier emails, weather data, and geopolitical news) to create a narrative of operations that mirrors the reality of the supply chain.

People are empowered to build tailored, composable AI solutions that continuously improve, automate and orchestrate supply chain operations - not just fixing problems, but preventing them altogether.

Consider one of Europe’s largest manufactures of packaging steel. By using Celonis to establish a data-driven, connected supply chain, the company can proactively mitigate supply risks, enhance delivery reliability, and optimize core processes.

This company in question has achieved significant improvements, including -

• Proactive prevention of material shortages, allowing timely interventions by anticipating potential disruptions.

• Improved delivery accuracy and on-time predictions, resulting in enhanced customer satisfaction.

• Optimized safety stock levels, reducing excess inventory while ensuring production continuity.

• Double-digit million savings potential in working capital, driven by more efficient inventory management and streamlined financial processes.

Watch - Make your supply chain resilient webinar series featuring McKinsey

The path to autonomous operations

The future of the enterprise is AI-driven and composable, but that future starts with making processes work. 2026 is the year the agentic supply chain takes flight, but it will only stay airborne if it is fueled by process intelligence.

By grounding supply chain transformation in process intelligence, businesses can finally balance the delicate equilibrium between cost, cash, and service levels. Whether the trigger is a localized shortage or a global maritime crisis, the true differentiator for global leaders will be the ability to move beyond "planning" to "doing" - resolving disruptions with the speed and transparency required to thrive in the era of agentic AI and constant change.