Following a year in which adjusting to new tariffs was the dominant challenge for supply chains, 2026 has brought a smorgasbord of headaches for small and medium-sized businesses.
When Netstock, a provider of supply chain planning and inventory management software, asked more than 150 SMB customers what factors most affected inventory planning this year, the top responses were nearly tied. The top response was swings in supplier lead time, cited by 29% of respondents. Second were raw material and input costs (23%), freight and shipping costs (23%) and demand shifts (21%).
However, 77% mentioned supplier lead time as being among the leading challenges, 72% did so for freight, 66% for raw material/input costs and 57% for demand shifts. “In other words, most SMBs are juggling multiple pressures at once,” Netstock wrote in its survey report.
The supply chain landscape of 2026 is defined by chaos, where several variables are in motion at once, compared to the typical brand of volatility, where variables shift one at a time, according to the report.
What’s more, lead times didn’t get worse for every business, Netstock noted. That is, a grouping of the fastest-moving businesses averaged 21 days, while the slowest averaged 79 days.
What defines resilience in the face of the overlapping challenges? It “isn’t about hitting every inventory measure on the scorecard,” Netstock wrote. “It’s about recognizing which problem matters most right now and acting on it without losing control of everything else.”
Netstock’s scorecard looks at four measures:
1. Having an active strategy for reducing excess inventory, applicable to 93% of survey respondents
2. Service levels above 90% (referring to how effectively a company meets customer demand without running out of inventory), applicable to 53% of respondents
3. The use of at least one alternative procurement strategy (34% of respondents)
4. Dead stock below 5% of excess inventory (32% of respondents)
While 73% of survey respondents met two or three of those measures, only 7% met all four.
Meanwhile, a majority of SMBs have optimized their inventory management, but a third are either understocked or in trouble on that front.
“Faster inventory movement is becoming more common, but it does not translate into the right stock being available when customers need it,” the report noted.
Additionally, the share of excess stock reported as dead, which had risen from 12% in 2024 to 17% in 2025, has climbed again this year, reaching 24%. A harder-to-predict supply-and-demand environment is leaving more businesses with inventory that no longer matches what customers need, Netstock wrote.
