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The fruits of this seamless global supply chain are obvious and important: .

, chief strategy officer at AMR Research, says today's global supply chains operate so robustly and efficiently because they are all connected by -production, logistics and pricing data, to name but a few.

"You can get a bid to build a machine part from a little foundry in India as well as a foundry in Indiana, and you can get that in 20 minutes," O'Marah says. "So you can connect yourself in completely unimaginable ways from even 10 years ago, let alone 20 or 30 years when the supply chain started to really emerge from the old factory work."

But as a result of this interconnectedness, . Ripples in one country can wind up being tsunamis in another located half a world away.