Six days sideways, and a decade of supply-chain rethinking
Ever Given is the canonical example of a chokepoint everyone knew about and almost nobody had modelled.
We were not in the room. Every reading on this desk is an outside analysis of public reporting, written to show how the method is applied — not to allege what any organisation knew or decided. Where we go beyond the public record we say so in the text.
On 23 March 2021 the container ship Ever Given grounded in the Suez Canal, blocking it in both directions for six days. Several hundred vessels queued. The Suez Canal Authority led the refloating operation. Estimates of daily trade held up ran into the billions of dollars, and the figures vary widely by source and method.
That the canal was a chokepoint was not news to anyone in shipping. What was missing was any operational model of what a multi-day closure does downstream — which specific plants stop, on which day, and what the cheapest available mitigation is on day two rather than day six. Firms discovered their exposure by living through it.
- Immediate: hundreds of vessels delayed, container equipment badly out of position for months afterwards.
- Industrial: production stoppages in automotive and electronics from components that were, in effect, unmodelled single-sourced.
- Strategic: a durable shift in how boards treat concentration risk in logistics — and a durable gap between talking about it and modelling it.
The class is a known risk that has never been quantified downstream. Everyone can name the chokepoint. Almost nobody can say what day three costs them, which is the only version of the knowledge that supports a decision.
One decision, made in the first hours: reroute, wait, or air-freight — and for which specific SKUs? That is a simulation over your own network with your own inventory positions, and it is worth very little if it is built after the event starts.
- Convert a named risk into a dated cost curve, which is what actually moves a budget.
- Pre-compute the mitigation decision so hour one is execution rather than analysis.
- Find the components whose single-sourcing is invisible because it sits two tiers down.
- Re-run it as the network changes, so the answer does not quietly go stale.
Naming a risk is level 1 thinking. Quantifying it against your own network, continuously, is level 4. Most supply-chain risk registers sit at level 1 and read as though they are at level 4.
Score your own position in five minutes — same model, no email wall. Or read what the levels mean.
Same seven steps, your asset, your data, your decision. That is the first half of a scoping workshop.