The full chain of steps, sourcing, manufacturing, shipping, that gets a product from raw material to your hands.
A supply chain is the entire sequence of companies, factories, and shipping routes a product passes through before it reaches a store shelf, from raw materials to component manufacturing to assembly to distribution. Modern supply chains are often global and deliberately spread across many countries to cut costs, which makes them efficient in calm times and fragile in disrupted ones: a single blocked shipping route, a factory shutdown, or a new tariff can ripple through and delay or raise the price of a huge range of unrelated products months later.
Part of the Open Bell Glossary — plain-English explanations of the terms that come up on the show. Browse every term.