Why operational resilience depends on clear priorities, visible supply chain dependencies and practiced decisions across an interconnected ecosystem.
A utility can have generation available and still face constraints elsewhere on its network. A manufacturer can have a factory ready to ship and still miss deliveries when trucks are unavailable. The conversation between host Peter Warren and Magali Amiel, CGI Director, Global Industry Lead for Manufacturing, shows why operational resilience depends on the wider system that keeps essential operations running.
In this episode of CGI’s Energy Transition Talks, Peter and Magali discuss how geopolitical uncertainty, climate change and supply chain disruption affect energy and manufacturing organizations. Their discussion highlights practical ways to set priorities, understand dependencies and prepare partners to make decisions together when conditions change.
- Identify the outcomes that must be protected. Agree which services, products and customers are most critical and clarify decision rights and escalation thresholds.
- Map dependencies across the operating ecosystem. Include utilities, suppliers, transportation, telecommunications, water and other services that can affect essential operations.
- Practice decisions with critical partners. Rehearse communication, escalation and contingency plans for situations when normal processes or information are unavailable.
Under normal conditions, organizations balance cost, service, efficiency, utilization and growth. A major disruption brings difficult choices: which production lines must continue, which customers or products take priority, where inventory can be reallocated and how capacity can shift. Utilities must determine which services and loads are most critical.
Leadership teams can define disruption tolerances, escalation thresholds and decision rights in advance. A shared understanding of these priorities gives teams a basis for acting quickly when a crisis occurs.
Once an organization identifies the outcomes it must maintain, it can work backward to identify what those outcomes require. A manufacturing operation may depend on electricity, water, telecommunications, raw materials, processing, transportation, people, data, suppliers and public agencies. A disruption in any link can affect delivery, even when the company’s own facility remains operational.
The episode gives examples of a manufacturer with no transportation capacity, a data center facing power and cooling constraints during extreme heat, and a utility with generation available but constraints elsewhere in its network. These dependencies can sit outside an organization’s direct control while still affecting its operations.
“The weakest link in your resilience strategy may be an asset you don’t own and a decision you don’t control.” — Magali Amiel
Utilities and manufacturers are interconnected, and each needs to understand what its partners need and what it must provide. Technology can support the exchange of information; operating models shape how partners use that information to coordinate decisions.
Utilities, manufacturers and the suppliers or infrastructure providers they rely on can clarify who is empowered to decide during a crisis, when an issue must be escalated, how they will communicate and what happens when normal digital processes are unavailable. Including those critical suppliers and infrastructure providers in scenario exercises helps the organizations test their arrangements together.
Documented plans need to be practiced. Organizations can rehearse scenarios with critical partners, test escalation and communication protocols, and work through how they will respond when normal processes or information are unavailable. Practice helps teams build the reflexes to make decisions and find solutions under pressure.
“The objective is to build decision muscles.” — Magali Amiel
Leaders cannot forecast every disruption. They can clarify priorities, surface dependencies and practice decisions with the partners their operations rely on. The real test comes when disruption hits: can the network make decisions together and keep essential operations running?
Listen to other podcasts in this series to learn more about the energy transition
Peter Warren
Hi everyone, and welcome back to another installment on our continuing series of discussions about the energy transition, what’s going on in the market and the interfaces of this world. And we’ve talked about this before. There’s a strong connection between manufacturing, the energy industry, because we need material, but we also supply that industry, and also the supply chains that we talked to and deal with on a daily basis. Today, my guest is Magali Amel, head of our manufacturing group. Magalie, do you want to introduce yourself further?
Magali Amiel
Hi, Peter. Nice to be with you today, and welcome to everyone. So, yes, my name is Magali Amial, come from France, but with CGI for five years now. Have a PhD on transport and logistics, but really interesting on the subject about ecosystem manufacturing and all around supply chain. And really happy to be with you today to discuss this interesting and really accurate topic.
Peter Warren
Thanks very much.
Peter Warren
And I think that we’ll just kick it off with we’ve kind of got three areas we want to titch in today. The first one is really resilience. The various impacts of going on with both wars, geopolitical impacts, tariffs. Our industry is facing a lot of impacts from not being able to get materials, looking at things. How do you deal with this ever-changing world?
Magali Amiel
That’s a very good question to start because the biggest change is that priorities become much more explicit with all the changes, geopolitics, climate change we are living right now. Under normal condition, organizations optimize for cost, service, efficiency, utilization, and growth. But during a major disruption, you cannot protect everything equally. So leaders have to determine very quickly what outcome matters most for them. From a manufacturing perspective, for example, that may mean deciding which production line must continue, which customer or product are prioritized, what inventory can be reallocated, and where capacity can be shifted. It’s really important because we cannot tackle all the issues at the same time. And for an utility, for example, the equivalent question is which services and loads are most critical because is where resilience has to be designed before the event. And because of the geopolitics, because of what we’re seeing on climate change and what we are living, the board and management need to have already defined disruption tolerance, escalation threshold, and decision rights. Otherwise, when the crisis occurs, precious time is spent debating priorities rather than executing them. And yes, you can have a continuity plan, but you don’t have a continuity readiness. So I would say resilience becomes real when an organization can move from optimization to prioritization without losing control.
Peter Warren
So that’s really interesting because there’s a lot of things that are outside of people’s control. You talked about control. There’s certain things in the organization you can do, but we’re really meshed in with everybody else now. How do they deal with the things that are outside of their control? How do they prioritize those things?
Magali Amiel
You cannot protect everything, right? So you have to determine which asset production or capabilities you must keep running. So usually the first reflex is to look at the asset. But when we look into the industry and, the best practice is really you start with the outcome. One of the traps in resilience planning is asking which assets are critical. But the best question is which outcomes cannot be allowed to fail. And once you identify those outcomes that help really the organization to take action is that essential production, safety, customer commitment, electricity supply, critical infrastructure, you can work backwards and identify everything required to deliver them. So that’s why it’s really important to ask the question of the outcomes before they asset. And that dependency chain can be surprisingly long because look, all the parts involve, for example, on manufacturing. You have the electricity, the water, the telecommunication, the raw material, the transformation, transportation, people, data, supplier, sometimes public agency or other. So you are dependent on each of them. Manufacturers, for example, organization. Do we have a continuity plan with all your partners in place?
Peter Warren
Yeah, and you mentioned too that the manufacturers need energy. And so this is a circular kind of economy aspect of this. Do you think that utilities and oil companies and other forms of energy companies should be reaching out to their suppliers and looking at the reciprocal arrangement between themselves? What do they need? What do we need? Is there some sort of connection of better communication that should be going on?
Magali Amiel
Absolutely. You have to be connected. That’s the world where we are, right? We are connected and interconnected, but sometimes we forget that. And we look at utilities and manufacturers, of course, and technology helps for them to really connect, but the question is also on their operating model. Do they have the right operating model, integrating the right information for the supplier to be sure that they are resilient? And, maybe twist things that people can take a look about their resiliency plan and the way they work with their partners when you talk about utilities and manufacturers, what they are empowered to decide during the crisis with their partner, when a decision has to escalate, and what happens when the normal digital processes are unavailable. Because you have to test these rehearsing scenarios, not simply documenting them.
Most of the time you have documentation, and you have some communication between people, but you don’t have a real scenario in place. You haven’t tested what could happen before. The objective is not to predict the exact next crisis or the exact next event, but because it’s impossible, right? But the objective is to build decision muscles because you work closely with your partners, because you have done this kind of practice, it’s easier when you are under pressure to test the team, and the team has some reflex to deal with the situation and to find real-time solution.
So the shift, what we are seeing into the industry is important, as moving from energy plans to practice decision making, including, escalation rules, communication protocol, annual fallbacks, and exercise with critical partners. Because you cannot scrap every disruption, but you can rehearse how the organization makes decisions under pressure.
Peter Warren
Yeah, I like that comment you made about having the right decision muscles and moving them through the organization and practicing it. Is that for the longest time, supply chains coming into the industry were very established, even the supply chain out was very established. But we can’t take that for granted. I know you and I published an article recently on climate change and how it’s impacting things, the fires, the floods, the whatever it happens to be. There’s just so many of those things moving forward, is that the unpredictable is happening and it’s impacting both the upstream, the downstream, it’s impacting our employees, it’s impacting our facilities. So, really, you’re saying it’s an organizational structure to change the way that they’re approaching. Do they have the organizational structure and the process in place should things go wrong? Do you want to expand upon that a little further and maybe dive into like how does somebody approach that? How do they change from what they’ve always done to maybe having that type of model?
Magali Amiel
That’s a good question. What we’re seeing, so that’s organization and company have spent decades improving the resilience of the assets. They have plants, create infrastructure, and data center. They have made some big investments. But as an organization can do everything right internally and still be unable to operate. That’s what we see because of the external impact.
For example, a manufacturer can have a perfectly functioning factory, but no transportation capacity. In the end, your product is ready to go, but you have no access to trucks to move it. So, you have a big disruption because you’re not connecting with your ecosystem, with your partner. A data center can have redundancy but compete for power and cooling during extreme heat, right? And because, for example, we are seeing more data centers and we see the impact on the community. A utility may have generation available but face constraints elsewhere in the network. So, of course, organizations for a long time really work on their own world.
For example, in manufacturing, I only control what is inside my factory, but today it’s not true anymore. You are interdependent and you are dependent on the others. So that’s why if you want to be less vulnerable, you have to move to be connected to your partners and you have to work with them. So, what we are seeing, the vulnerability has moved from the asset to the dependency. That’s why resilience must be managed at ecosystem level. What matters is not simply whether my organization is resilient, it is whether the network required to deliver the outcome is resilient enough.
The weakest link in your resilience strategy may be an asset you don’t own and a decision you don’t control. I’m a manufacturer, but I don’t want my electricity and my power access. And if my utilities are shut down and it shut down all my activities, I cannot control that. But that impacts my operation. So that’s this kind of discussion on how you build this dependency connection with your entire ecosystem to be sure you have decision, you can act according to what even happened into your business.
Peter Warren
Thank you very much. And I’ll give you the last word, Magali.
Magali Amiel
I think that the subject we can discuss hours and hours because what we’re seeing right now in the industry is really exciting and at the same time really challenging because it’s a new way of working, right? Integrating into your ecosystem. But maybe one thing that is important to keep in mind that the future of resilience is not about predicting the next disruption, it’s about building organization, an ecosystem that can see disruption earlier, understand its consequences, and still have options when it arrives.
Peter Warren
Perfect. Thank you very much, and we’ll see everybody in our next episode. Bye.
