The Silent Saboteur’s reach spreads across the value chain
11/12/2025 Schneider Electric UK Ltd
by Kas Mohammed, Schneider Electric’s Vice President for Services UK&I
One area I’d love to have explored in Schneider’s new Industry Insights 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.
Once we’ve driven it out of the production environment through smart technologies (as the report advises), the Saboteur retreats to the shadows to plot revenge. Here it targets other business-critical areas that remain in the dark and vulnerable to disruption — this could be logistics, warehousing, energy infrastructure, supply chains and field operations.
While the character might be fictional, the impact is all too real. 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, it was possible to be prepared — through introducing on-site distributed power and smart technologies to keep machinery running efficiently — and crucially, stay online during the disruption.
This isn’t the only case. Supply chain disruption as triggered by things like The Red Sea crisis too, triggered by Houthi attacks on commercial shipping lanes, but businesses with visibility provided by smart technologies were able to identify areas of weakness in advance and make swift pivots to reroute, reshore or qualify alternative suppliers thanks to upfront efforts.
To think the Saboteur only operates on the shop floor are mistaken and so, businesses must banish them across their operations. As the world continues to get more complex, dangerous, and prone to disruption, with companies vying for resources and paying top dollar to outcompete their peers. The way to remain competitive? 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. Lurking 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 operational environment. 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 was significant, and the interwoven nature of these threats compounds problems.
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’. Disruption today is persistent, global and increasingly expensive. Businesses agree that visibility is everything, because only once you’ve found the problem, can you address it. 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%.
We’re even seeing companies turning to chatbots during times of crisis. 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.
The list of challenges and threats don’t end there. Energy volatility and grid instability, as well as rising costs, continue to place a strain on organisations, 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.
The system-wide impact of small failures
It‘s worth noting 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 – it's time to find the Silent Saboteur and give your teams the tools to hear the havoc is wreaking before it’s usually noticed. Systems today are woven together, so a small issue quickly ripples across the entire business. 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.
Seeing the whole board
The last version of the celebrities Traitors highlighted how hard it is to find a traitor with a lack of information. The same is true for business. Organisations need to pull the cloak back on their operations. 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.
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