Industrial resilience: the key role of value chains
Industrial resilience is no longer at the enterprise level, but at the level of value chains. In strategic sectors such as defense, performance depends on the ability to understand and manage complex interdependencies: suppliers, resources, geopolitical constraints, operational continuity. Faced with chains that are still difficult to read and fragmented data, extra-financial data is becoming a key lever for structuring a common language between actors and strengthening the collective capacity to anticipate, finance and act.
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Performance is at the level of value chains
A company's performance depends on its ability to be part of a robust ecosystem. In strategic sectors such as defence, this reality is even more pronounced.
A company can be efficient, innovative and well managed. If a critical link in its value chain is weakened, the entire system is impacted.
Resilience is built and is based on the ability to understand and manage complex interdependencies: supplier relationships, technological dependencies, geopolitical constraints, access to resources, business continuity.
These elements are based on a collective logic: the company can no longer be thought of as an autonomous entity.
Management limited by a fragmented vision
The industrial reality is that of interconnected value chains, where each actor depends on the others to produce, deliver and transform.
This changes the way of management and poses a challenge because each actor has its own culture and history and also has a partial vision, often focused on its immediate perimeter.
- Today, value chains remain largely invisible.
- Dependencies are poorly documented.
- The risks are fragmented.
- There is little information available.
This fragmentation limits the collective capacity to anticipate, arbitrate and invest.
A blind spot for financing and insurance
It also complicates the role of financial actors.
- How to assess a company's risk without understanding its positioning in the value chain?
- How to finance an activity without visibility on its critical dependencies?
- How to insure a company without reading its capacity for continuity?
Data as the common language of ecosystems
This is where data plays a structuring role.
Industrial resilience is based on the ability to produce a common language between actors: companies, funders, insurers, institutions.
A language capable of describing dependencies, risks, and coping skills.
A language that makes it possible to make value chains readable.
In this perspective, approaches such as VSME, and their extension into VSME+ at the level of sectors and territories, provide a structuring framework.
They make it possible to go beyond an individual reading of performance to integrate dimensions essential to sovereignty: critical dependencies, territorial anchoring, exposure to geopolitical risks, the robustness of industrial ecosystems.
VSME+ thus becomes a tool for achieving coherence between companies in the same value chain, but also between economic, financial and institutional actors at the level of a territory.
Towards a better allocation of capital and a logic of foresight
This readability is a condition for coordination.
- It makes it possible to better allocate capital.
- To better direct investments.
- To better share risks.
Above all, it makes it possible to move from a logic of reaction to a logic of anticipate and identify weaknesses, precisely thanks to the work done on the dependencies between the stakeholders in the value chain.
In BITD, this challenge is strategic and above all directly linked to the strengthening of the capacity for operational excellence of an entire sector that responds to its own dynamics.
The ability to produce, maintain and evolve defense systems depends directly on the robustness of industrial value chains, which, however, must be treated by taking into account the fact that, while there are few pure players in the defense sector, the majority are companies whose activities are dual.
Strengthening this robustness means better connecting actors, better structuring information and better sharing analyses. It is based on the quality of interactions between the actors that make up these value chains. It also depends on their willingness to combine their efforts, their resources, and even to join forces in order to create major European players in order to thus meet the needs for capital and operational and human capacity that they face.