Why do we have inventory and still can't deliver?

A supply chain can appear healthy when suppliers are delivering, inventory is available, transportation is moving, and demand remains within expected ranges. Its actual resilience becomes visible when one of those conditions changes.

The most important dependency is not always the largest supplier, the longest lead time, or the component with the highest cost.

A relatively small constraint can propagate through inventory, production, logistics, capacity, and customer demand until it becomes the limiting factor for the entire system. Conventional supplier and inventory metrics may identify individual risks without showing how those risks combine under disruption.

This Hard Case follows a supply disruption through ruwbi's six-step method to determine where the system was actually vulnerable and what would fail first.