The ideal supply chain
By Burkhard Eling | 7 minute read
10/11/2026
What makes a good supply chain? Maximum efficiency alone is not enough. What matters is that it meets a company’s strategic requirements. DACHSER CEO Burkhard Eling explains why supply chain optimization always means setting priorities and making trade-offs.
Supply chain optimization, i.e., the question of how to organize the flow of goods more efficiently, has always been pivotal for our business. And yet, the question has become considerably more complex in recent years. In conversations with customers and business leaders alike, I am often asked about dos and don’ts when optimizing a supply chain. Where should companies start? What should they prioritize? And what does an ideal supply chain actually look like?
My answer is as simple as it is complex: There is no single “best” supply chain. The best solution always depends on what a particular business needs its supply chain to achieve.
The goal is not to find a theoretical optimum; it’s to find the right balance for the individual business.
Burkhard Eling, DACHSER CEO
A recent project with IGP, a Swiss manufacturer of powder coatings, illustrates what I mean. The company offers more than 17,500 products and serves customers across Europe. One requirement is particularly important to its business: Orders need to reach customers within 24 to 48 hours.
When we analyzed different scenarios for IGP’s European supply chain, greater centralization initially looked attractive, as it promised synergies and a leaner setup. There was just one problem: Delivery times would have increased to three or four days. What appeared to be an efficient solution would have undermined an essential requirement of the customer’s business.
For me, this gets to the heart of supply chain optimization. The goal is not to find a theoretical optimum; it’s to find the right balance for the individual business.
How can a complex supply chain be optimized without compromising delivery speed and service? IGP Pulvertechnik shows how DACHSER and the Swiss powder coating manufacturer analyzed various scenarios and used them to develop a new logistics model.
Optimization means making trade-offs
Service quality, resilience, cost, speed—all of these matter. But they can also pull a supply chain in different directions
More inventory may increase resilience but tie up working capital. Centralization can create efficiencies but increase delivery times. Faster lead times may improve service but come at a higher cost. And the lowest-cost solution today may leave a company exposed when sudden supply chain disruptions occur.
The starting question isn’t “How can we make this supply chain more efficient?” Instead, it’s “What does this particular business need its supply chain to achieve?” That distinction matters now more than ever.
Many supply chains have evolved over years or even decades. A warehouse was added here, a supplier there, a new market entered somewhere else. Each decision probably made perfect sense at the time. But the structure that emerges from hundreds of smart individual decisions isn’t necessarily the structure a company would choose if it were designing its supply chain today.
At the same time, the environment around these structures has changed dramatically. Supply chains have become more global, more complex, and also more vulnerable. Whether it’s the pandemic or the recent conflicts in the Middle East, companies need to maintain the ability to deliver and control costs while dealing with volatile markets, geopolitical uncertainty, and changing customer expectations. At the same time, sustainability has moved up the agenda as well.
As a result, supply chain design is no longer just an operational question; it is increasingly becoming a strategic one.
Before optimizing a supply chain, understand it
So how do you determine what the right supply chain looks like? When we at DACHSER work on optimizing supply chains for our customers, the starting point is transparency. Before changing anything, we need to understand the entire end-to-end supply chain rather than looking at air freight, sea freight, road transport, or warehousing in isolation.
How do we do that? We create a digital twin of the existing setup and use it to simulate various network and transportation concepts. That way, we can look at different scenarios such as changing warehouse locations and the impact on costs, or alternative consolidation structures and their consequences for service levels or emissions. Working with a digital twin allows us to make trade-offs visible before we make any changes to the physical supply chain.
While data alone shouldn’t drive the decision, it does give us better options. The strategic priorities of the individual business determine which option is right.
Take another one of our customers, an international automotive company. Through redesigning global transportation and consolidation structures, we were able to reduce transport costs by up to 15 percent and CO2 emissions by around 21 percent. In this case, economic efficiency and sustainability reinforced each other rather than competing with each other. Still, that doesn’t mean the same setup would work for the next customer.
A supply chain has to work outside the simulation
There’s another aspect of supply chain optimization that I believe is sometimes underestimated. Finding a mathematically attractive target structure isn’t enough, because a supply chain has to operate in the real world. The best supply chain strategy is worth very little if it can’t be implemented.
This is an important part of our approach at DACHSER. We don’t want to just present a theoretical target scenario. Our aim is to translate the results of our analysis into an operational solution that can actually be implemented within our integrated global network.
Technology will make this process increasingly powerful. Digital twins, scenario modeling, and AI-supported analysis will allow companies to understand the consequences of potential changes before committing to them. I expect supply chains to become much more data-driven and much more extensively simulated over the coming years.
The more scenarios we can calculate, the more important it becomes to know what we’re optimizing for.
But I don’t think technology will eliminate the need for judgment. Quite the opposite. The more scenarios we can calculate, the more important it becomes to know what we’re optimizing for. Service quality? Resilience? Cost, speed, sustainability? The answer probably won’t be just one of these aspects, but a combination. And it won’t be the same for every company.
The goal, therefore, shouldn’t be to build the perfect supply chain. It should be to build the supply chain that fits the strategy of the business. A supply chain that remains adaptable when the world around it changes. Because in the end, the best supply chain isn’t the one that looks perfect on paper. It’s the one that works for your business.
