Supply Chain Mapping Can Highlight Opportunities to Grow an Economy

Chmura’s economists have been working with local communities for nearly a decade to understand the sources of their local competitiveness and strengths of their key industrial clusters. Several techniques exist for this type of analysis and one commonly utilized component is to examine an area’s key clusters for missing links in the supply chain. Many times this helps for marketing campaigns or economic gardening efforts in order to attract firms or spur entrepreneurial activity to address these gaps and augment and strengthen an existing industry cluster. In many cases, the search for supply chain gaps utilizes national models of what an industry and its many sub-industries have in common. Where additional data are available or can be collected, an alternative methodology can be used for much greater specificity, particularly when the local industry cluster has very specific suppliers or itself is part of a very complex value-chain from start to finish. Always looking to innovate, Chmura has produced a unique way to map the actual supply chain of industry clusters utilizing cutting edge network analysis. The results speak for themselves in an unprecedented, granular look at economic leakages, supply chain gaps, and cluster synergies.