One area we didn’t have time to explore in Schneider’s new report The Silent Saboteur — which introduces a fictional character whose unseen actions are responsible for overlooked faults, inefficiencies and failures that lead to significant industrial downtime — is the Saboteur’s influence beyond the shop floor.
.jpg?width=1200)
Once driven out of the production environment by smart technologies (as the report advises), the Saboteur, seeking revenge, retreats to the shadows, targeting other business-critical areas that remain in the dark and vulnerable to disruption — such as logistics, warehousing, energy infrastructure, supply chains and field operations.
You can see this type of disruption in headlines across the world. Take the Iberian Peninsula outage, for example, caused by two factors: a lack of real-time visibility and overly conservative operational planning around grid stability. The Spanish employers' association (CEOE) estimated the economic hit at €1.6 billion. Yet businesses that prepared for this kind of disruption — by introducing on-site distributed power and smart technologies to keep machinery running efficiently — stayed online and in production.
The Red Sea crisis too, triggered by Houthi attacks on commercial shipping lanes, caused widespread supply chain rerouting, spiralling costs and severe disruption to businesses around the globe. But businesses with smart technologies providing visibility across their supply chains were able to identify areas of weakness in advance and make swift pivots to reroute, reshore or qualify alternative suppliers thanks to upfront efforts.
Businesses that think they can banish disruption by installing smart tech only on the shop floor are mistaken. The world is far more complex, dangerous, prone to disruption and more competitive than ever, with companies vying for resources and paying top dollar to outcompete their peers. The solution? Shore up resilience with smart technology across the value chain. Only then can businesses stay ahead of disruption.
Where does the Saboteur fit into all this? Wherever visibility is lacking in operations, the Saboteur is waiting. He’s everywhere and nowhere — so in this piece, we’ll explore where the Saboteur strikes across the value chain in 2025, and the systemic impact of small failures.
Where the Saboteur hits in 2025?
Before exploring the Saboteur’s movements in 2025, it’s worth understanding the context shaping his actions. This year was marked by a convergence of global instability, rapid digitisation, climate risk, and shifting regulatory demands. While no year is free of disruption, 2025 represents a turning point, where multiple forces are now feeding into one another, and businesses face wider, more complex, and more interconnected threats than ever before.
Topping this list is supply chain risk. McKinsey describes the sector as being in ‘near-constant turbulence and what some might call a ‘perma-crisis’. That the supply chain management market was valued at $38.5 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $58.42 billion by 2030. Disruption is no longer isolated or short term; it’s persistent, global and increasingly expensive. Businesses agree that visibility is everything, because if you can see or pre-empt the problem, there’s a fix. And its outdated infrastructure, fragmented data that is problematic and often the leading cause of disruption.
Meanwhile, GenAI has emerged as one of the ‘shiniest tools in the box’ for supply chain, says McKinsey. While smart tech and IoT devices are providing visibility, GenAI is wiping out the administrative errors that cause disruption. For example, it can significantly reduce the lead time for producing documentation, by up to 60% but also reduce human errors by 10-20%.
Perhaps most interesting was that during a disruption event, one company worked with a chatbot to provide advice to pressured order managers. When asked to choose an outcome that would maximise EBITDA, the chatbot chose to prioritise a fast-growing new customer. Not necessarily the best answer, but one that prioritises resilience, the best tool for combating the Saboteur, and shows a future where supply chains are augmented.
What else? Energy volatility and grid instability, as well as rising costs, continue to hit operations hard, especially in manufacturing. Right now, businesses using Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Power system can reduce downtime and energy waste by up to 15–20%, while addressing continuity challenges during regional outages by operating onsite energy production and storage. Talent shortages are a hidden source of disruption — especially when systems still depend on manual intervention or tribal knowledge. And warehousing and inventory resilience is becoming increasingly important, no longer just for storage but needing to act as dynamic fulfilment hubs.
The system-wide impact of small failures
All of this is to say that the Saboteur’s disruptive efforts are compounding in 2025, leading to what’s best summarised by this adage, “death by a thousand cuts.”
According to McKinsey, supply chain disruptions that last longer than a month now occur on average every 3.7 years, and such disruptions can cost businesses up to 45% of a year's profit over the course of a decade. The average global cost of a data breach has increased, too, by 10% to about $4.88 million per incident in 2024, with costs continuing to rise into 2025.
Due to the interconnectedness of systems, micro-failures can ripple through a system creating an entry point for larger systemic breakdowns. In the UK, a spate of ransomware attacks in 2025 on third-party suppliers led to major impacts on payments, online orders and food supply, and in one case, cost $40 million in losses per week for approximately 46 days.
Small failures escalate because of two things: interdependency and a lack of visibility. When businesses can’t see small issues forming, or react when they do, all hell breaks loose.
Seeing the whole board
In the board game Cluedo, the object is to determine who committed the crime, where it happened, and with what weapon. In 2025, for businesses, the strikes come from all sides, in every room. Better to pull the desk lamp over the board, illuminate the action, and play dungeon master through smart technologies than to be accosted in the dark.
With business failure rates rising, and the looming dual threats of AI and the energy transition, the case for smart, connected infrastructure has never been stronger. Economic instability, fragmented supply chains, rising energy costs, and talent shortages are no longer temporary headwinds — they are the new operating environment.
Thriving in this landscape requires stripping back, building resilience, and transforming into a well-oiled machine, with visibility across every room, every tool, and every move.