Would your alternative still be available when other businesses need it too?
A backup plan is only useful if the resources it depends on are available when the main plan fails.
BASF reported that prolonged low Rhine water levels in 2018 restricted raw-material deliveries, reduced plant utilisation and lowered earnings by around €250 million. Its account of the logistics response also describes limited availability of suitable rail tank cars.
This was not a business with no response. BASF describes monitoring conditions, coordinating logistics and production, prioritising raw materials and communicating with customers. The case illustrates how difficult substitution can become when disruption affects a shared transport system.
The alternative has dependencies too
A growing manufacturer may expect to change carrier, move goods by road rather than water, or obtain material from another location. That can be sensible. Naming the alternative, however, does not establish that it will work.
Suitable vehicles, loading facilities, handling equipment, staff and delivery slots may all be needed. Other businesses may seek the same resources at the same time. An assurance of availability under normal conditions does not settle availability during widespread disruption.
The same principle applies beyond freight. An alternative warehouse needs usable space. A replacement supplier needs capacity. A temporary production arrangement needs compatible equipment and the required approvals.
A practical test is to ask what would prevent the alternative from working, rather than simply asking whether an alternative exists.
Decide before choices narrow
An effective response links procurement, production and customer commitments. A transport provider may know its capacity without knowing which of your inputs will become critical first.
The business therefore needs an agreed sequence: what to monitor, when to change arrangements, which inputs take priority and who can authorise the decision.
An early trigger may preserve choices that disappear once the normal route is unusable. That does not mean switching at every warning. It means understanding the cost of acting, the cost of waiting and the evidence needed to decide.
For a growing business, this can be a focused exercise around one critical process. Ask the people responsible to demonstrate how its alternative arrangements would work if several organisations needed them simultaneously. Identify what remains unconfirmed and who will resolve it.
BASF’s disclosures establish the operational and earnings effects of low water. They do not quantify how much of this event was caused by human-caused warming. Describing the whole earnings effect as an attributed climate-change loss would go beyond the evidence.
We would judge a backup by its demonstrated capacity and activation arrangements, not by its presence in a document.
Which of your alternatives depends on capacity that other businesses would also be trying to secure?
Sources
Based on public reporting, checked 25 October 2026. This is not an E-Squared client case study. Header image is illustrative.
