Immediately I'd convene the crisis management team — procurement, operations, logistics, and commercial. We'd assess which SKUs are most affected, prioritize based on revenue contribution and customer commitments. I'd activate our pre-qualified backup suppliers and negotiate emergency volumes. Simultaneously, I'd work with the commercial team to manage customer expectations on any potential delays. The demand planning team would run scenarios on safety stock depletion rates.
Strengths
- Immediately convening a cross-functional crisis team shows you understand supply chain disruptions require enterprise-wide response.
- Prioritizing by revenue contribution and customer commitments shows commercial awareness alongside operational thinking.
- Activating pre-qualified backup suppliers demonstrates proactive risk management — you planned for this scenario.
Improve
- Reference a specific past crisis — COVID, Suez Canal, or a supplier bankruptcy — to prove you've done this before.
- Quantify the impact: how many SKUs, what revenue at risk, how many customers affected.
- Describe the resolution outcome: service level maintained, cost of emergency procurement, lessons learned.
During COVID-19, when our primary palm oil supplier in Malaysia shut down — representing 35% of our raw material volume across 120 SKUs generating €800M in annual revenue — I executed a crisis response that maintained 97% service levels while competitors averaged 82%. In the first 4 hours, I convened our war room with procurement, operations, logistics, commercial, and finance — a protocol I had established specifically for single-source concentration risks. We ran our pre-built scenario model showing safety stock depletion curves by SKU, identifying 18 critical products that would stock-out within 2 weeks. By hour 12, my procurement team had activated 3 pre-qualified backup suppliers in Indonesia and Colombia that I had onboarded 18 months earlier precisely for geographic diversification. We negotiated emergency volumes at a 15% premium, which I pre-approved against our risk contingency budget of €5M. By hour 24, I had personally called our top 10 retail customers — representing 60% of affected volume — to share our response plan and revised delivery schedules. Transparency prevented any contract penalties. By hour 48, the first emergency shipments were in transit. Over 6 weeks, we maintained 97% fill rates, spent €3.2M in incremental costs (well within contingency), and retained every major customer account. Post-crisis, I accelerated our dual-sourcing program from 60% to 95% of critical materials within 12 months.