Business Week Magazine has dedicated its current issue special report to Katrina, human tolls and its damages to Energy infrastructure.

Actually, when I was reading the report, one of the things that came to my mind was:

You do everything to improve your lead times, logistics and overall supply chain performance and then, a hurricane comes and changes everything...

But, I think the situation is not that bad for companies who have bought a solution with contingency plan or planning for change module. Majority of the solutions available in the market include such a subsystem but many companies just don't use it.

It's a very good idea to put that into practice. These subsystems usually give the user the ability to track supplier performance, route availability, and be able to run alternate scenarios in as close to real time as possible.

If you don't want the overall chain to crash down in one night (by a possible disaster), start to take a look at these scenario based simulations...