ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns itself with bringing together all of the design principles discussed so far. It is a walkthrough of Descartes R, a risk-based resilience reasoning system designed for Unilever. It examines how to de-risk a large, complex and multinationally distributed supply chain operation for a globally critical brand in the VUCA environment of Argentina. The system is described by following its main reasoning tasks (critical operations and geography; strategic priority Stock Keeping Unit portfolio; key supplier risk; manufacturing resilience; and harmonised sources of risk). This analysis demonstrates appetite for complexity – blending as it does facts, data, judgements and heuristics in a controlling narrative which reflects the complexity of the system in question. The decision making is linked to routine business controls, not the extraordinary language of threat or crisis management. The conclusions exemplify modelling with risk and resilience constructs bound, in data and decision making terms, to an obvious business materiality. The impact of countermeasures is calculated in normal business referents using profit, turnover and volume. The conclusion of this chapter is that the quality of the risk-based resilience reasoning caused by this system and the efficacy of its results are their own justification as to its fitness for purpose.
