Are Retail Supply Chains Ready For Tumultuous Times?
Benchmark Report
August 2025
Brian Kilcourse and Steve Rowen
Managing Partners, RSR Research
IORMA Advisory Board Members
The Authors of this FREE Report discuss the results of their Research in the video which appears below and also below is the link to download the full FREE Report.
54.30 Minutes
Executive Summary
Key Findings
The data for this research was collected just prior to the imposition of sweeping tariffs by the United States in late April 2025. When the research was conducted, retailers and their suppliers indeed knew change was coming – but they did not yet know the details.
Now, in July 2025, the confusion that was swirling around supply chain activities then continues. Our industry still does not know much more about the details, as fluctuations in policies and market swing wildly from one week to the next.
The following are some of the highlights from this report:
- When it comes to Technology Enablers, our respondents couldn’t be more clear: technologies that improve forecasting by offering multiple different scenarios based on fluctuations in demand are the way through all of this. Unfortunately, not enough have implemented these tools yet – and for those that have, they don’t have enough experience with them to fully trust their suggestions yet. Retailers are behind here.
- When it comes to Operational Challenges, retailers’ top concern is that rapid changes in consumer demand are already undercutting their ability to buy big and lower costs. On the supply side, the biggest challenge is securing availability of supply. Even before an environment of widespread tariffs kicked in, the very hint of it coming to fruition had retailers starting to investigate alternative sources of supply closer to home.
- Retailers’ supply chains have made tremendous improvements since the dramatic shocks and resulting lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. The best performers (what RSR calls Retail Winners) have spent the past few years with an outsized focus on building agility into their supply chains as result – 93% put high value in alerts on unexpected supply shortages, 73% into new demand forecasting tools. These Winners perceive entirely different Opportunities than average and under-performers do.
- However, there is more work to be done to make most retailers’ supply chain resilient – the top 3 Organizational Inhibitors that retailers cite are #1: lacking visibility at key points along their supply network, #2: dependence on shippers to manage disruptions, and #3: legacy systems that are too fractured to respond. It will be very tough for brands in such situations to weather the type of trade chaos that appears inevitable.
- Based on our findings, we also offer several in-depth and pragmatic suggestions on how retailers should proceed. These recommendations can be found in the Bootstrap Recommendations portion of the report.
We certainly hope you find the data and insight valuable.
Brian Kilcourse and Steve Rowen