AI for Supply Chain Strategy

End-of-lesson check

15 questions · take it digitally for instant feedback at tendril.neural-forge.io/learn/quiz/end-business-AI-and-supply-chain-strategy-adults

1. What did COVID-19 expose about 'just-in-time' supply chains?

   1. They were too expensive to maintain long-term
   2. They were optimized for cost efficiency at the expense of resilience
   3. They depended too heavily on technology
   4. They didn't account for labor costs adequately

2. What is 'concentration risk' in a supply chain?

   1. Having too many suppliers to manage efficiently
   2. Dependence on a single supplier or single geography, creating vulnerability to localized disruption
   3. Concentrating all inventory in one warehouse
   4. Focusing all supplier relationships in one industry vertical

3. The tradeoff between 'just in time' and 'just in case' supply chain strategies is fundamentally between:

   1. Speed and quality
   2. Cost efficiency and resilience
   3. Domestic and international sourcing
   4. Technology investment and labor investment

4. What does 'dual-source analysis' examine?

   1. Whether to manufacture products in two factories simultaneously
   2. The cost and resilience trade-off of adding a second supplier for a component
   3. Using two data sources to verify supplier information
   4. Splitting a purchase order between two geographies

5. What is 'safety stock' or 'buffer inventory' in supply chain management?

   1. Inventory reserved for VIP customers
   2. Extra inventory held to absorb supply disruptions without halting operations
   3. Products stored in a secure backup facility
   4. Minimum inventory levels required by regulation

6. A concentration risk audit recommended in the lesson asks AI to identify:

   1. Every supplier with revenue above a certain threshold
   2. Every single-source component and single-country dependency, plus revenue at risk if each goes offline for 8 weeks
   3. Every supplier that has had a delivery delay in the past year
   4. Components that are sourced from more than three suppliers

7. Which of these supply chain decisions MUST remain with human operations leaders?

   1. Modeling cost impact of adding a second supplier
   2. Calculating safety stock levels for an 8-week disruption scenario
   3. Negotiating terms and managing the relationship with a key supplier
   4. Mapping single-source dependencies across the supplier base

8. Why should a concentration risk audit be run annually?

   1. Regulatory requirements mandate annual supply chain audits
   2. Supply chains change over time, and new concentration risks can emerge as the business grows or shifts
   3. It's cheaper to run annually than more frequently
   4. Annual cycles match the fiscal year planning process

9. What does AI contribute to supply chain scenario modeling?

   1. AI builds supplier relationships on behalf of operations teams
   2. AI quantifies cost and lead time impacts across disruption scenarios, surfacing trade-offs for human decision-makers
   3. AI predicts exactly which suppliers will experience disruptions
   4. AI negotiates better terms with suppliers automatically

10. A company's AI audit reveals that 40% of its revenue depends on a single supplier in one country. This is best described as:

    1. An efficient, optimized supply chain
    2. A significant concentration risk requiring strategic attention
    3. A standard arrangement for the industry
    4. An acceptable level of risk for a fast-growing company

11. The 'efficiency advantage of concentration' in supply chain refers to:

    1. The ability to manage fewer supplier relationships with less administrative overhead
    2. Lower costs, simpler coordination, and often better pricing from committing volume to one great supplier
    3. Having one warehouse location for all inventory
    4. Concentrating all supplier negotiations in one department

12. If a supplier goes offline for 8 weeks, 'revenue at risk' measures:

    1. How much the company owes the supplier
    2. The revenue impact of not being able to produce or deliver the components that supplier provides
    3. The cost of finding a replacement supplier
    4. The financial penalty clauses in the supplier contract

13. Supply chain strategy in 2026 requires balancing which two competing priorities?

    1. Speed of delivery and product quality
    2. Cost efficiency through concentration and resilience through diversification
    3. Domestic sourcing and international expansion
    4. Supplier count and inventory level

14. Operations leaders 'make the final call on supplier relationships.' What does AI provide to support that call?

    1. A binding recommendation that simplifies the decision
    2. A quantified view of the options and trade-offs — the analytical inputs that make the decision informed
    3. An automatic evaluation of each supplier's trustworthiness
    4. Replacement recommendations when suppliers underperform

15. A concentration risk audit 'routinely surfaces risks that were invisible to leadership.' Why were those risks invisible?

    1. Leadership had hidden the risks intentionally
    2. Without systematic analysis, single-source dependencies often aren't visible — they're buried in individual supplier records no one was synthesizing
    3. The risks didn't exist until the audit created them
    4. Suppliers had hidden the concentration from the company