supply chain

noun

plural supply chains

: the chain of processes, businesses, etc. by which a commodity is produced and distributed : the companies, materials, and systems involved in manufacturing and delivering goods

The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain—that's the usually invisible pathway of manufacturing, transportation and logistics that gets goods from where they are manufactured, mined or grown to where they are going. At the end of the chain is another company or a consumer who has paid for the finished product.

—Peter S. Goodman

Everyday life in the United States is acutely dependent on the perpetual motion of the supply chain, in which food and medicine and furniture and clothing all compete for many of the same logistical resources. … [W]hen a finite supply of packaging can't keep up with demand, when there aren't enough longshoremen or truck drivers or postal workers, when a container ship gets wedged sideways in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes—the effects ripple outward for weeks or months, emptying shelves and raising prices in ways that can seem random. All of a sudden, you can't buy kettlebells or canned seltzer.

—Amanda Mull

Examples of supply chain in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

And then broad chaos in the global supply chain helped deliver another economic affliction: inflation. —Peter S. Goodman, New York Times, 2 June 2024

Solving that problem for a global supply chain requires extremely high-quality data coupled with sophisticated analytics. —Daniel Pellathy, The Conversation, 31 May 2024

More broadly, tech firms and manufacturers are shifting their supply chains to the region amid a fractious U.S.-China relationship. —Lionel Lim, Fortune Asia, 30 May 2024

There are clear solutions, such as ensuring financial resources to build regional research and manufacturing facilities, securing supply chains, and transferring the technology necessary for producing medical products. —Alexandra Phelan, STAT, 27 May 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1948, in the meaning defined above