How to triage hundreds of supplier sites after a regional earthquake
A regional quake hits and somewhere on your end there's a spreadsheet with three hundred supplier sites in it. Tier 1, tier 2, a few single points of failure buried in there that nobody remembers until they're gone. Within an hour someone is going to ask which of those sites are actually affected, and "we're reaching out to suppliers now" is not an answer that survives a second asking.
Here's a method that holds up when the list is long and the clock is short.
Start with the footprint, not the region name
The first mistake is treating "earthquake in [region]" as a proxy for which sites are hit. A magnitude 6.5 can have a shake-intensity footprint that covers one county and misses the next one entirely, even though both sit inside the same news headline. If your triage starts by pulling every site tagged with that state or province, you're already sorting the wrong list.
Pull the event's actual damage footprint first. Then overlay your named sites against it. Anything outside the footprint gets set aside immediately, no matter how close it looks on a regional map. Anything inside goes into the working pile.
Split the working pile by what you can actually see
Being inside the footprint doesn't mean a site is damaged. Shake intensity varies block to block depending on soil and construction, so the next cut is: does this site show visible damage, or not.
This is the step that usually gets outsourced to waiting. You wait for the supplier to call in. You wait for a field adjuster to drive out. Both are reasonable asks on a normal day, and both take days you don't have when an allocation call or a claims reserve is due this afternoon.
A faster version of this step: get a satellite or aerial look at each named site, called in by the event rather than on a routine schedule, and sort the inside-footprint pile into visible damage versus no visible damage. That alone turns three hundred unknowns into a short list of sites that need a person on the ground today and a much longer list that can wait until tomorrow.
Prioritizing supplier sites post-disaster
Once you've got inside/outside and damage/no-damage, prioritization almost sorts itself:
- Inside the footprint, visible damage: top of the list, every time. These are your allocation and claims decisions.
- Inside the footprint, no visible damage: second priority. Worth a call to confirm, but not a dispatch.
- Outside the footprint: deprioritized regardless of tier ranking. A tier-1 supplier outside the footprint is not more urgent than a tier-3 supplier inside it.
This is where the list surprises people. The supplier everyone assumes was hit, because they're in the headline region, sometimes sits outside the actual footprint. The single point of failure nobody flagged sometimes sits right in the middle of it. Working from the footprint instead of the map legend is what catches that.
Why self-reports lag the decision
A supplier slow to report damage is usually dealing with the quake itself, not stalling you. Power's out, phones are down, the person who'd normally make that call is checking on family. A report that arrives two or three days later is honest and also useless for a decision that had to be made on day one.
The same gap applies to adjusters. A drive-out gets you ground truth, eventually, for one site at a time. It was never built to answer "which of our three hundred sites got hit" by end of day.
If your current process for this starts and ends with waiting on someone else to tell you, Supplier Impact Assessment runs the per-site check against the event's footprint instead, so the sorting above happens in hours rather than days.
Next time a regional quake lands near your supplier base, run your named-site list against the actual footprint before you run it against the map.