Gartner Says to Build an Elastic Supply Chain
There's a question underneath all the conversations about geopolitical risk, nearshoring, and supply chain resilience that doesn't get asked directly enough: are you designing your supply chain for protection, or for growth? Gartner's research suggests most companies default to protection — and that defaulting to protection is exactly the wrong instinct for the moment we're in.
The firm's recent report, The Elastic Supply Chain, makes a pointed case to chief supply chain officers about the cost of operating defensively when the global environment demands greater sophistication. It's worth examining closely — because the infrastructure it implies is one most supply chains haven't fully built yet.
Key Takeaways
- Gartner's research found that 73% of supply chain leaders experienced negative impacts from Russia-NATO tensions, 64% from pandemic fallout, and 52% from U.S.-China competition — geopolitical risk is now a permanent operating condition, not a temporary disruption
- The "elastic supply chain" concept reframes risk management: rather than retreating to trust boundaries, CSCOs should build the flexibility to operate across geopolitical blocs with agility and informed decision-making
- Gartner's three recommended actions — clarifying operating boundaries, assessing the elastic opportunity, and conducting scenario analysis — all require reliable, normalized transportation data as a prerequisite
- 88% of Gartner survey respondents expected significant positive impact from scenario planning, yet most supply chains still make geopolitical decisions reactively and without adequate data
- The elastic supply chain is a present-tense operating requirement; enterprises that invest in freight data infrastructure now are better positioned to respond when geopolitical conditions shift quickly
What Gartner Found
The research opens with a data point that provides useful context. According to Gartner's CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, 59% of respondents in supply-chain-intensive industries identified business growth as a top-three priority — up 26% year over year. CEOs want growth. They expect supply chains to enable it, not constrain it.
The problem is that CSCOs are simultaneously managing a risk environment that continues to grow more complex. When Gartner surveyed 258 supply chain leaders about geopolitical risks impacting their operations, the results were sobering. Tensions between Russia and NATO negatively affected supply chain performance for 73% of respondents. The COVID-19 pandemic and its fallout negatively affected 64%. U.S.-China strategic competition was cited as a negative factor by 52% of respondents. Cyberattacks matched that figure exactly. Energy security concerns hit 49%.
The picture that emerges isn't a list of one-off disruptions. It's a permanent operating condition. Geopolitical volatility isn't something to manage through until things stabilize — because they aren't. The report treats this as the starting premise, and everything that follows is built on accepting it.
The Elastic Supply Chain Concept
Gartner's central argument is a reframe. When geopolitical risk emerges or intensifies, the instinctive response for most enterprises is to pull back — to tighten trust boundaries, consolidate into known partnerships, orient toward reshoring or friendshoring, and generally reduce exposure. That posture feels prudent. Gartner argues it's also limiting.
The alternative is what the firm calls an "elastic supply chain" — one capable of extending into and retracting from markets outside a company's primary geopolitical bloc, depending on conditions. Rather than treating geopolitical risk as something to avoid, the elastic model treats it as something to prepare for, monitor, and respond to with agility. The goal is flexibility in the service of growth, not rigidity in the service of safety.
To get there, Gartner identifies three actions CSCOs need to take.
The first is clarifying operating boundaries. Global enterprises already operate across geopolitical blocs — to access materials, manufacture goods, and reach customers. The question isn't whether to operate across those lines, but how to do so with clear understanding of where the limits are. That requires analyzing key stakeholders across every market — employees, partners, customers, government relationships — and understanding the risk-to-value balance each represents. This isn't a one-time exercise. It requires ongoing monitoring as conditions change.
The second action is assessing the elastic opportunity itself. When the business is looking to expand capacity, enter new markets, or reduce concentration risk, a more elastic posture is worth evaluating — but with clear eyes about what it costs. Greater elasticity increases supply chain complexity, can drive up inventory levels, and requires more sophisticated coordination across carriers, partners, and regions. That's not a reason to avoid it. It's a reason to go in informed.
The third action is to conduct scenario analysis of geopolitical risk events. This is where Gartner's data is particularly striking. Fully 88% of respondents to the firm's Geopolitical Risks survey expected a moderate to very high positive impact from scenario planning when facing geopolitical risk. That's a near-unanimous endorsement of preemptive planning — yet most supply chains still make geopolitical decisions reactively, under pressure, with limited options. The cost of that gap isn't theoretical. It shows up in rushed carrier decisions, stranded inventory, and procurement choices made without adequate visibility into alternatives.
The Data Problem Nobody Names Directly
Gartner's framework is strategically sound. But there's a practical gap between the elastic supply chain as a concept and the elastic supply chain as an operating reality — and that gap is data.
Scenario planning, stakeholder risk analysis, and elastic capacity decisions all require one thing before anything else: a clear, accurate picture of what's actually happening in your transportation network. Which carriers are you using on which lanes? What are the cost and performance profiles of those relationships? Where are you most concentrated, and therefore most exposed? How does your spend distribute across geopolitical regions, and how would that distribution need to shift under different risk scenarios?
For most global enterprises, that picture is harder to produce than it should be. Transportation data is fragmented across carriers, regions, and systems. Charge codes aren't standardized. Multi-currency complexity introduces additional reconciliation challenges. And when data is managed by regional teams independently — which is the norm in large, globally distributed supply chains — there's no single source of truth that a CSCO can act on when conditions change quickly.
This is precisely the problem Trax is built to solve. The Prizma platform processes over $20 billion in global transportation spend across all modes, currencies, and regions — with a single data architecture that normalizes carrier data to consistent standards regardless of where the shipment originated or how it was invoiced. That normalization is what makes cross-regional analysis possible. When every lane, carrier, and charge type is visible on a single platform, the concentration risk analysis Gartner recommends is achievable rather than aspirational.
Visibility as a Prerequisite for Agility
The elastic supply chain, as Gartner describes it, is an active capability — not a contingency plan that sits on a shelf. It requires the ability to anticipate disruption, model alternatives, and shift carrier relationships and sourcing networks with reasonable speed. None of that is possible without continuous, reliable visibility into transportation spend and performance.
Trax's freight audit and data management capabilities give supply chain leaders visibility into 100% of invoices in real time, at the charge-code level. When a geopolitical event disrupts a key trade lane, the response isn't a scramble to pull data from multiple regional systems and reconcile it manually. It's an immediate view of which shipments are affected, what the alternative carrier options have historically looked like on that lane, and what the cost implications of rerouting would be.
The Rate Control capability within Prizma extends this further — giving procurement and logistics teams centralized visibility into contracted rates and spot activity across the carrier network. When scenario planning for geopolitical risk requires modeling the cost of a shift in carrier mix, that analysis is grounded in actual rate data rather than estimates.
Commentary: The Timing of the Report Matters
It's worth noting when this research was published and what was happening in the geopolitical environment when supply chain leaders responded to Gartner's surveys. The tensions flagged — U.S.-China competition, energy security, pandemic fallout — were already well-established. Since then, the introduction of sweeping tariff changes, continued pressure on global trade routes, and renewed focus on supply chain sovereignty have only intensified the dynamics Gartner identified.
The implication for CSCOs reading this report today is that the elastic supply chain isn't a future-state planning exercise. It's a present-tense operating requirement. Enterprises that are already building data infrastructure to support scenario analysis and elastic capacity decisions have a meaningful head start over those still managing geopolitical risk through intuition and reactive decision-making.
Gartner notes that advanced analytics and AI technologies can provide visibility into geopolitical events that require an elastic supply chain capability. That's accurate — but only if the underlying data is clean, normalized, and available at the speed at which decisions are actually made.
What to Do With This
If you're a CSCO working through what the elastic supply chain framework means for your operations, the starting point isn't organizational structure or scenario planning workshops. It's an honest assessment of your transportation data infrastructure. Can you see your full carrier network, across all regions, in a single system? Can you model the cost and performance implications of shifting volume from one trade lane to another? Can you produce that analysis in days rather than weeks?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, the flexibility Gartner recommends isn't within reach yet — regardless of how well-designed the strategy is.
Contact Trax to see how normalized global freight data can give your supply chain the visibility it needs to operate with the agility that the current geopolitical environment demands.