Standing up the supply chain for a new consumer-electronics product means qualifying suppliers, securing semiconductors and rare-earth metals, setting up inbound logistics and customs, building inventory buffers, onboarding a contract manufacturer and ramping to volume -- eleven activities in all. Six discrete supply-chain risks (key-supplier delays, port disruptions, price spikes, tariff shocks, contractor shortfalls and yield issues) can each inject delay and cost. Tamara runs the whole network as one 60,000-iteration Monte-Carlo, so every chart below is driven by the same model.
The deterministic plan stands the chain up in 538 days, but a supply chain is only as fast as its slowest sourcing leg. The first question is not "when" but "which activity decides when" -- because that is where management attention actually moves the launch date.
The tornado ranks each of the eleven activities by how strongly its own duration swings the launch date -- the Spearman correlation between activity duration and project finish across all 60,000 runs. A long bar means that activity, by itself, decides whether the chain is ready.
Semiconductor sourcing dominates at 0.54 -- nearly half again the leverage of anything else on the list. Customs & compliance clearance (0.37) and inbound logistics setup (0.36) follow. The message for a launch sponsor is blunt: secure silicon first, because that single leg moves the date more than any other lever.
Drilling into per-activity timing, the stochastic Gantt shows each activity's P50 finish bar with a P10-P90 whisker. The widest whiskers mark the legs whose timing is least certain.
Semiconductor sourcing and the downstream onboarding and ramp activities carry the widest whiskers -- the same legs that topped the tornado, now seen as raw timing spread rather than correlation.
Translating that uncertainty into a date, the S-curve converts the 60,000 simulated launch dates into the probability that the chain is ready by any given date.
The deterministic plan lands at 538 days, but the simulated P50 is 681 days and the P90 is 782, with a mean of 684. Only 2% of runs are ready by the deterministic plan. The schedule contingency from plan to P80 is 208 days -- about 6.8 months beyond the tidy plan.
Six discrete risks can each fire on top of the activity-duration uncertainty. The Pareto ranks them by expected schedule impact -- probability times mean delay -- with the cumulative line showing concentration.
The top four of six risks carry roughly 80% of the expected discrete-risk delay. A key-supplier delivery delay leads at 3.8 weeks expected, followed by transportation / port disruption at 2.6 weeks, a geopolitical / tariff shock at 2.1 weeks and a component quality / yield issue at 2.0 weeks. A raw-material price spike barely moves the schedule (0.5 weeks) -- its damage is in cost, not time.
Schedule risk and cost risk are the same risk. Every day beyond the plan carries carrying cost and lost launch-window margin, and the discrete risks carry direct costs of their own. The before/after histogram shows the total programme cost distribution and the effect of mitigation.
Before mitigation the cost averages $29.5M with a P90 of $33.8M, and 22% of runs breach the $32M budget. Mitigation -- supplier diversification, inventory buffers, dynamic-pricing contracts and early contract-manufacturer onboarding -- pulls the mean to $27.1M, the P90 to $30.4M, and the probability of breaching budget from 22% down to 3%. The gap between the curves is the value of the risk-management programme, quantified.
Tamara turns an eleven-activity supply-chain stand-up into a quantified risk position. The tornado names the one leg -- semiconductor sourcing -- that decides the launch date; the Gantt and S-curve size the spread and the contingency; the Pareto ranks the discrete threats; and the cost chart prices the mitigation. Together they convert an optimistic 538-day plan into decisions a launch sponsor can actually defend.