Published by
Published on
March 10, 2026
By Greg Mueller, VP of Customer Strategy, Optilogic
On February 28, 2026, the world woke up to a new reality. U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran triggered a chain of events that effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, cutting off roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply, spiking crude prices by more than 60% (since print), and sending Maersk, CMA CGM, MSC, and Hapag-Lloyd scrambling to suspend bookings or reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. Risk and insurance premiums on tanker transits surged overnight, air cargo carriers halted flights across the entire Middle East region, and European natural gas prices nearly doubled in 48 hours.
It’s the most dramatic headline in recent memory, but supply chain leaders who’ve been paying attention anticipated Iran war disruptions months or even years ago.
Supply chains have seen an endless stream of disruptions and shocks to global systems in the past decade. The norm now is that tariff shifts change cost structures overnight and long-standing trade alliances are renegotiated or abandoned altogether. Geographic center of manufacturing that had been stable for decades are caught in geopolitical tensions. The rules of global trade are being rewritten each time one of these global disruptions happen.
Supply chain leaders are being asked by exec teams and boards, “What should we do?” The questions being asked today should have been answered six months ago. Not because anyone could have predicted the specific sequence of events, but because the conditions that make networks susceptible to these disruptions have been visible for years.
What the Hormuz crisis exposed was a structural problem that was always there. Covid, tariffs, regulatory changes, and oil price spikes are types of global disruption that have become the norm, unfortunately not the exception.
The Strait of Hormuz is less than 20 miles wide at its narrowest point. It facilitates roughly 11% of global ocean transportation and more oil and LNG than any other passage on earth. Unlike the Red Sea, where vessels can reroute around Africa when the Suez passage is too dangerous/congested, Hormuz has no viable alternative.
Business leaders have known these facts all along, and yet networks were built with deep dependencies on single regions, single-source supply strategies and single fail points that were efficient right up until the moment they failed.
This isn’t a problem specific to the Strait of Hormuz or even the Middle East. The same logic applies to every company that built its cost structure around the premise of static supply chains, made foreign direct investments in low-cost/one-time-safe bets, or did not evaluate or create action plans for known geopolitical risks. These are all design problems.
The companies that rapidly recover from or are minimally exposed to this crisis share a common trait. They have been scanning their supply chains and asking “What If” questions about their network flows, risk points and structure before disruption forced the question.
They model scenarios and pressure test their networks against conditions that don’t exist yet. They’ve run the numbers on what a 14-day transit extension means for cost and service, and they’ve made deliberate choices about where to absorb that risk and where to reduce it.
This capability is more critical now than virtually any other supply chain capability. Gartner research has uncovered that there are 2.5 high-impact disruptions per month that can impact 88% of critical customers, products, regions or markets. Scenario analysis is supply chain design done continuously, not as an annual exercise. Only 19% of organizations are fully integrating a scenario planning capability into their supply chain strategy.
Planning processes are very good at optimizing within the network you have. Most supply chain teams work IN the network they have been given, with the tools that are available. A small percentage of team members work ON the system itself, optimizing, testing and developing action plans.
Planning cannot tell you whether you should have a different network altogether. That distinction matters enormously right now.
Your planning teams are likely working a spreadsheet exercise right now, as the planning systems in place likely do not have these new scenarios and flows setup. World-class supply chain organizations invest in continuous design and scenario planning capability.
Design answers the “What If?” questions:
You can’t answer those questions with a planning tool. You need a design tool that lets you model complex structural scenarios at scale, stress-test your network against conditions that are uncertain and make decisions based on where you want to be rather than where you’ve been.
The supply chain executives who are handling this moment best aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated planning algorithms. They’re the ones who’ve built the organizational muscle and the platform capability to run what-if analyses in hours.
That’s what it means to be a king or queen of what-if. It’s not only about having answers in advance. It’s about being able to pressure-test your options quickly when the world changes, and to be able to make a decision grounded in data rather than instinct.
Right now, the most important questions aren’t operational. They’re structural:
Every one of those questions has an answer. But you can’t find the answer without a model sophisticated enough to hold the complexity, and a team fast enough to run the scenarios before the window for decision closes.
Here’s what I tell supply chain leaders: the scenario analysis and supply chain design capability is largely underleveraged by most organizations. The companies that navigate this decade well won’t be the ones who did a network redesign; they’ll be the ones who made design and scenario a continuous capability.
The Hormuz crisis is acute today. But the underlying conditions from geopolitical fragmentation, new tariffs, the realignment of global trade flows, energy market volatility, and the reorganization of manufacturing toward regional centers are not going away. We’re not returning to the stable, predictable, low-cost global trade environment that made lean, concentrated, single-source supply chains look brilliant for thirty years.
The era of planning your way to competitive advantage is over. You can’t plan your way out of a bad structure. The question for every supply chain leader right now isn’t how to manage this disruption. It's whether you have the capability to redesign your network before the next disruption forces your hand.
That’s not a technology question. It’s a strategic one, and technology, specifically the ability to run complex scenario analysis at scale continuously is what makes the strategy executable.
The Strait of Hormuz will reopen; the next tariff announcement will land on a Tuesday with no warning; an alliance that looked permanent will shift, and something else entirely will happen that nobody saw coming. The supply chains that survive the next decade won’t be the most optimized ones. They’ll be the most adaptable — and adaptability is designed, not planned.
By Greg Mueller, VP of Customer Strategy, Optilogic
On February 28, 2026, the world woke up to a new reality. U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran triggered a chain of events that effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, cutting off roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply, spiking crude prices by more than 60% (since print), and sending Maersk, CMA CGM, MSC, and Hapag-Lloyd scrambling to suspend bookings or reroute around the Cape of Good Hope. Risk and insurance premiums on tanker transits surged overnight, air cargo carriers halted flights across the entire Middle East region, and European natural gas prices nearly doubled in 48 hours.
It’s the most dramatic headline in recent memory, but supply chain leaders who’ve been paying attention anticipated Iran war disruptions months or even years ago.
Supply chains have seen an endless stream of disruptions and shocks to global systems in the past decade. The norm now is that tariff shifts change cost structures overnight and long-standing trade alliances are renegotiated or abandoned altogether. Geographic center of manufacturing that had been stable for decades are caught in geopolitical tensions. The rules of global trade are being rewritten each time one of these global disruptions happen.
Supply chain leaders are being asked by exec teams and boards, “What should we do?” The questions being asked today should have been answered six months ago. Not because anyone could have predicted the specific sequence of events, but because the conditions that make networks susceptible to these disruptions have been visible for years.
What the Hormuz crisis exposed was a structural problem that was always there. Covid, tariffs, regulatory changes, and oil price spikes are types of global disruption that have become the norm, unfortunately not the exception.
The Strait of Hormuz is less than 20 miles wide at its narrowest point. It facilitates roughly 11% of global ocean transportation and more oil and LNG than any other passage on earth. Unlike the Red Sea, where vessels can reroute around Africa when the Suez passage is too dangerous/congested, Hormuz has no viable alternative.
Business leaders have known these facts all along, and yet networks were built with deep dependencies on single regions, single-source supply strategies and single fail points that were efficient right up until the moment they failed.
This isn’t a problem specific to the Strait of Hormuz or even the Middle East. The same logic applies to every company that built its cost structure around the premise of static supply chains, made foreign direct investments in low-cost/one-time-safe bets, or did not evaluate or create action plans for known geopolitical risks. These are all design problems.
The companies that rapidly recover from or are minimally exposed to this crisis share a common trait. They have been scanning their supply chains and asking “What If” questions about their network flows, risk points and structure before disruption forced the question.
They model scenarios and pressure test their networks against conditions that don’t exist yet. They’ve run the numbers on what a 14-day transit extension means for cost and service, and they’ve made deliberate choices about where to absorb that risk and where to reduce it.
This capability is more critical now than virtually any other supply chain capability. Gartner research has uncovered that there are 2.5 high-impact disruptions per month that can impact 88% of critical customers, products, regions or markets. Scenario analysis is supply chain design done continuously, not as an annual exercise. Only 19% of organizations are fully integrating a scenario planning capability into their supply chain strategy.
Planning processes are very good at optimizing within the network you have. Most supply chain teams work IN the network they have been given, with the tools that are available. A small percentage of team members work ON the system itself, optimizing, testing and developing action plans.
Planning cannot tell you whether you should have a different network altogether. That distinction matters enormously right now.
Your planning teams are likely working a spreadsheet exercise right now, as the planning systems in place likely do not have these new scenarios and flows setup. World-class supply chain organizations invest in continuous design and scenario planning capability.
Design answers the “What If?” questions:
You can’t answer those questions with a planning tool. You need a design tool that lets you model complex structural scenarios at scale, stress-test your network against conditions that are uncertain and make decisions based on where you want to be rather than where you’ve been.
The supply chain executives who are handling this moment best aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated planning algorithms. They’re the ones who’ve built the organizational muscle and the platform capability to run what-if analyses in hours.
That’s what it means to be a king or queen of what-if. It’s not only about having answers in advance. It’s about being able to pressure-test your options quickly when the world changes, and to be able to make a decision grounded in data rather than instinct.
Right now, the most important questions aren’t operational. They’re structural:
Every one of those questions has an answer. But you can’t find the answer without a model sophisticated enough to hold the complexity, and a team fast enough to run the scenarios before the window for decision closes.
Here’s what I tell supply chain leaders: the scenario analysis and supply chain design capability is largely underleveraged by most organizations. The companies that navigate this decade well won’t be the ones who did a network redesign; they’ll be the ones who made design and scenario a continuous capability.
The Hormuz crisis is acute today. But the underlying conditions from geopolitical fragmentation, new tariffs, the realignment of global trade flows, energy market volatility, and the reorganization of manufacturing toward regional centers are not going away. We’re not returning to the stable, predictable, low-cost global trade environment that made lean, concentrated, single-source supply chains look brilliant for thirty years.
The era of planning your way to competitive advantage is over. You can’t plan your way out of a bad structure. The question for every supply chain leader right now isn’t how to manage this disruption. It's whether you have the capability to redesign your network before the next disruption forces your hand.
That’s not a technology question. It’s a strategic one, and technology, specifically the ability to run complex scenario analysis at scale continuously is what makes the strategy executable.
The Strait of Hormuz will reopen; the next tariff announcement will land on a Tuesday with no warning; an alliance that looked permanent will shift, and something else entirely will happen that nobody saw coming. The supply chains that survive the next decade won’t be the most optimized ones. They’ll be the most adaptable — and adaptability is designed, not planned.
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