#1 The Seven Deadly Supply Chain Sins: Supply Chains behave dynamically
22 June 2025
Unleash Your Inner Two-Year-Old:
6 August 202515 May 2025
Spotlight
Lessons from the Coal-Face: Supply Chain Strategy Optimisation
For more than thirty years, Sequoia has helped some of the world’s leading manufacturing and retail businesses redesign their supply chain networks to reduce cost, unlock growth and build long-term competitive advantage.
Drawing on insights from over 15 recent network design case studies, we’ve identified clear, repeatable lessons on what drives successful transformation.
Why Restructure Your Supply Chain Network?
Your network is the backbone of your supply chain. It directly determines your cost to serve, your ability to scale, and the service you deliver to customers. Yet our work consistently shows that most incumbent networks are far from optimal, shaped more by historical decisions than by today’s strategic needs.
Clients typically embark on restructuring programmes to reduce operating costs (45%), enable growth (36%), or achieve both simultaneously (18%). When done well, the rewards are substantial: network optimisation regularly delivers operating cost reductions of 10–15%, with some clients achieving savings of up to 25%.
Often, a specific trigger—such as an acquisition, a major lease decision or a capacity expansion—creates a window of opportunity to step back and re-engineer the entire network. What starts as a tactical decision frequently becomes a catalyst for transformational improvement, including entry into new markets or channels such as e-commerce.
What Investment Is Required?
The incremental capital required for restructuring varies widely, from minimal investment through to £350m, depending on network complexity and automation. Manufacturing strategies tend to be more capital intensive, although advanced distribution networks can reach comparable levels.
Crucially, the focus should be on incremental capital: the additional investment above what is already required to sustain the existing network over the next decade. In many cases, maintaining the status quo is far from cheap. When viewed this way, restructuring often represents a highly attractive return, delivering significant operating cost improvements for relatively limited additional spend.
What About Payback?
Strategic network transformations are long-term by nature and typically deliver payback beyond five years. This can be challenging for organisations under short-term performance pressure.
However, our experience shows that businesses willing to take a longer-term view are often the ones that reshape their competitive position—while those that delay risk being overtaken by more decisive rivals.
Managing Risk - and Staying Ahead?
Network redesign is a rare and complex undertaking, and perceived risk can lead businesses to default to the ‘safe’ option. In reality, our casework shows that the biggest risk is inaction. Competitors that invest early in new technologies and scalable infrastructure can achieve step-change improvements in cost and capacity, creating barriers that are difficult—and sometimes impossible—for late movers to overcome.
Sequoia’s proven, data-driven approach combines rigorous modelling with decades of hands-on experience. We give clients the clarity, confidence and evidence they need to make bold decisions, unlock sustainable value and future-proof their supply chain networks.