Strengthening manufacturing supply chains for a new industrial era

Manufacturing industries worldwide are navigating intense uncertainty and transformation. As the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report highlights, supply chain disruptions caused by climate events, geopolitical fragmentation and cyber incidents are converging into systemic shocks.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which form the backbone of supply networks and represent about 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide, often lack the capital, infrastructure or visibility to respond effectively. As a result, global manufacturing ecosystems risk becoming less resilient, less competitive and less aligned with emerging industrial and environmental demands.

In this changing landscape, traditional approaches to supply chain finance and development are proving inadequate. Isolated asset purchases, invoice factoring and short-term solutions fail to address the systemic issues at hand.

To build the resilient and future-ready supply chains that industry and society require, a fundamentally new approach is needed. That’s where programmatic supply chain finance comes in: a model designed to invest in industrial ecosystems as integrated portfolios, building resilience, capability and competitiveness at scale.

The current supply chain financing paradigm is predominantly reactive and fragmented. Most financial instruments focus on working capital or invoice finance, such as factoring or discounting, which may temporarily ease liquidity pressures but do not support strategic transformation.

Critically, these tools do not provide capital for capacity or capability upgrades, such as digitization, process innovation or energy efficiency.

In addition, financing tends to occur at the level of individual firms, with each supplier needing to secure its own funding. This results in:

This piecemeal model is fundamentally unsuited to address the systemic challenges facing modern industrial value chains. A shift is needed from fragmented finance to strategic, end-to-end investment in supply chain ecosystems.

One critical lesson from recent years is that supply chains must be strengthened as interconnected systems – not as loose collections of individual firms. End-to-end supply chain transformation recognizes this systemic nature and offers a path to greater resilience, efficiency and sustainability.

Instead of focusing on point solutions and incremental improvements in isolated links, an entire system solution is needed for the transformation to upgrade capabilities across the entire value chain. This is already proven and the real benefits of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and broader advantages like sustainability can only be unlocked when transforming entire systems, instead of tasks.

This means coordinated investment in technology adoption, capacity expansion, process innovation and workforce development, as well as addressing systemic risks such as climate-related disruptions, regulatory changes, and shifts in global demand patterns.

End-to-end transformation both enhances the performance of individual companies and also strengthens the collective competitiveness of industrial sectors. It creates supply chains that are better able to withstand shocks, deliver high-quality products reliably and meet increasingly stringent environmental and social standards.

As countries seek to anchor critical industries domestically and support the transition to net-zero economies, transforming supply chains in a coordinated, strategic way becomes a national priority as well as a business imperative.

Unlike traditional financing mechanisms that target individual companies or transactions, the programmatic supply chain finance approach treats a group of interconnected suppliers as an investment portfolio, aiming to systematically upgrade their capabilities over time.

The methodology begins with the selection and assessment of a strategic supply chain segment. A cohort of suppliers – often mid-sized manufacturers critical to a particular sector – is evaluated using established industrial maturity frameworks.

These assessments create a detailed picture of operational strengths, technology gaps, workforce skills, sustainability practices and overall readiness for growth and innovation.

Building on this analysis, tailored investment roadmaps are developed for each firm to identify priority areas for capital expenditure, such as new machinery, digitalization tools or energy-efficient upgrades, as well as necessary operational improvements – including training programmes and process re-engineering.

Crucially, these roadmaps are coordinated across the entire cohort, ensuring that investments align with the broader needs of the supply chain and avoid creating new bottlenecks.

A key innovation lies in the aggregation of data across the cohort to de-risk the investment proposition. By combining the maturity scores, financial health indicators and improvement roadmaps of multiple firms, it becomes possible to create a diversified and transparent investment portfolio.

Stronger performers help balance risks associated with weaker ones, and the overall supply chain’s transformation journey can be tracked against clear benchmarks and milestones.

As a data-driven, portfolio-based approach, it enables the mobilization of institutional capital at a scale not typically accessible to individual SMEs. Large investors, attracted by diversified risk profiles and transparent outcome tracking, can fund transformation programmes through structured finance vehicles. Blended finance models, combining public and private funding and different risk/return profiles, can further enhance the attractiveness of such investments.

This is not a new fintech product or a financial app; it is a systems-based investment model grounded in the operational realities of industrial value chains. Its novelty lies in its methodological coordination, risk mitigation through portfolio aggregation, and strategic alignment with national and sectoral objectives.

Finally, continuous tracking and benchmarking are central to the model's success. Each participating company’s progress is monitored against their specific roadmap, and aggregated cohort-level results are used to measure impact.

Productivity gains, emissions reductions, digital maturity improvements and revenue growth are tracked to ensure accountability and to provide a basis for scaling the model across additional sectors and geographies.

In effect, programmatic supply chain finance moves industrial development from fragmented, reactive fixes toward proactive, strategic transformation of supply networks, better positioning industries for long-term competitiveness and sustainability.

The programmatic supply chain finance model is sector-agnostic yet highly configurable. By adapting assessment frameworks to reflect sector-specific priorities, the model can support supply chain upgrading in diverse strategic sectors such as:

The approach enables targeted outcomes, like emissions reduction, productivity growth or regional development, by tailoring the investment roadmap and impact tracking to the strategic needs of the sector and its original equipment manufacturer (OEM) anchors.

The need for resilient, technologically advanced and sustainable supply chains has never been clearer. Programmatic supply chain finance provides a clear pathway to these kind of manufacturing ecosystems. But realizing this vision requires unprecedented collaboration and a rethinking of the current approaches:

Technology, especially a robust digital core and a strong commitment to data quality in all companies across the supply chain, builds the basis and a key success factor.

Leaders are encouraged to treat data as a strategic asset and focus on a strong data foundation as well as on a best-of-suite strategy to achieve better integration and faster return on invest along the supply chain.

For all stakeholders the message is clear: the future of manufacturing will belong to those who invest in supply chains not just as cost centres, but as strategic assets for resilience, innovation and growth. Now is the time to act, and to build supply chains capable of powering the industries of tomorrow.