Two rival DTC brands rely on the same carrier to transport shipments within its primary overseas market. Everything works smoothly, with customers receiving orders as expected and SLAs being met… until a failure of the provider’s routing platform coupled with a personnel shortage lead to delays and broken communication.

Both businesses have backup carriers on their rate cards. But only one of the brands:

• has fully integrated those carriers into its systems
• has tested their operations and is aware of how the resulting customer experience might differ from the standard
• retains up-to-date information on capacity and rates
• has empowered its team to reroute volume to them

The other brand has done none of those things. As a result, while they’re scrambling to implement their backup strategy, their rival is already delivering orders to satisfied customers.

This isn’t some wildly improbable scenario. We’ve seen operational events like this occur, along with widely varying responses by businesses. For instance, during the 2024 holiday-season Canada Post strike, brands that had already qualified an alternate route adjusted within days, or even hours; businesses that hadn't spent the same window arguing about who had the authority to make the call.

Strikes, storms, systems failures, route blockages, and other external disruptions are difficult or impossible to predict and control. But having qualified alternatives in place, tested and ready to go, prevents such operational events from eroding a business’s service levels and causing irreparable damage to its customer relationships. 

Diagnosing both cause and effect

Operational events are the second stage of shadow loss chain. The first stage, structural exposure, refers to the vulnerabilities inherent in a business’s shipping program. Every program is exposed to some degree. An operational event doesn’t create the exposure, but it can test the program’s structure and make unseen vulnerabilities painfully apparent. The Canada Post strike, for example, exposed the vulnerability of relying on one carrier.

Before a business can develop and implement executable alternatives to mitigate the damage of operational events, a business needs to pinpoint the program’s vulnerabilities. The type and volume of goods you ship, where you ship them, the type and number of providers you use: These are among the factors that determine exactly where your shipping program is most at risk from external disruptions.

Beyond assessing the structural exposure itself, organizations should also determine which customers would be most likely to receive a materially different experience than what they’d expected. Also important to assess: Should an operational event occur, how quickly could the organization identify those affected?

When an organization can establish which customers are feeling the effects of a disruption, it can quickly communicate with them what is happening, redirect their orders, and reset their expectations. This helps to minimize any downstream effects that lead to the third stage of the shadow loss chain, customer experience degradation and from there, silent churn. 

What counts as an operational event?

Given the complexity of modern-day logistics, the variety of potential operational events isn’t surprising. They include:

• Strikes, lockouts, and other labor disputes
• Labor shortages such as not enough truck drivers to transport scheduled capacity
• Capacity shortages such as a lack of distribution space
• Severe weather or natural disasters 
• Tariff changes and customs holds
• Geopolitical crises
• Port or terminal congestion and shutdowns
• Provider market exits
• Equipment or software failures

Any such event can result in service suspensions, shipment delays, increased expenses, and the need to reroute to qualified alternatives.

Event severity isn’t the whole story

When an operational event occurs, teams typically home in on the disruption itself: the anticipated length of a strike, the number of container ships stranded by a port shutdown, the number of markets affected, the size of the backlog. Those metrics alone, however, do not determine the event’s effect on a shipping program, the business’s customers, and the organization’s revenue, customer retention rates, and profitability.

A different set of variables shapes the impact:

• How quickly a business identified the event
• How long it took to decide whether to reroute
• What percentage of volume moved immediately
• Which markets had no viable alternatives
• Whether the alternative routes preserved the original service promise
• How quickly customers received accurate updates

Response latency, the amount of time between the initial disruption and the beginning of the response, dictates the shape and significance of the resulting operational event. A business that immediately identifies a significant event, rapidly reroutes to executable alternatives with little if any service degradation, and communicates with customers in near real time is less likely to suffer shadow loss or other substantial fallout from an operational event than an organization that takes longer to identify and respond to the same or even a smaller disruption.  

Why resolved doesn’t mean absorbed

Executable alternatives such as multi-carrier orchestration with a tested dynamic rerouting mechanism can allow parcels to be successfully delivered despite external disruptions. But resolving operational events in this way doesn’t necessarily equate to the ramifications of the event being completely absorbed. 

Even a successful reroute can introduce longer transit times, less precise tracking, extra handoffs, unfamiliar delivery procedures, higher duties or fees, or communication gaps. A customer might receive notification that a delivery would arrive late, for instance, but then be unable to track the parcel as they have in the past. Or perhaps the alternative carrier requires the customer to personally sign for the delivery whereas they never had to before. 

Operational reports might capture these changes. But they won’t show how customers felt about the changes and whether those feelings will alter their future behavior, such as lead them to purchase from a competitor. This is where operational response becomes a customer service question. 

Why rerouting should be routine, not emergency

In 2025 alone, the number of rerouting events within the ePost Global network soared an astonishing 2,458%. This suggests that, with increasing weather volatility and economic and geopolitical turbulence, operational disruptions are no longer rare. The Canada Post strike, attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, and a Shanghai port shutdown are just a few recent operational events that forced businesses to turn to qualified logistics alternatives. 

You can read about lessons learned from these and other events in our post “Five Years of International Shipping Disruptions: What They Exposed, What’s Coming Next.” The most significant takeaways:

• A shipping program that performs well under normal conditions is not always the same as a shipping program that performs well when conditions shift.  
• Building optionality into your shipping program now enables you to respond quickly and effectively to operational events. 
• Rapid response enables you to minimize customer experience degradation and communicate any unavoidable changes to customers so that they can adjust their expectations. 

How will your shipping program respond to operational events?

A resilient shipping program is one that assumes conditions will change and is built to continue moving orders when they do. It can dynamically reroute to alternative carriers whose negotiated rates work at volume and that have confirmed capacity, market-specific customs and compliance readiness, and tested handoff procedures. A resilient program also enables the company to communicate revised expectations to customers so that they never feel abandoned. 

The ePG Market Readiness Assessment is a quick way to assess your shipping program’s resilience to operational events. Once you’re aware of your program’s structural exposure, you can take steps to mitigate it. You can’t control external disruptions, but you can control how your organization responds to them.

FAQ: Operational events

What is an operational event in the shadow loss chain?

In the shadow loss chain, an operational event such as a carrier strike, a route blockage, or another external disruption reveals a shipping program’s vulnerabilities. A program that lacks executable alternatives to enable rerouting so that customers can receive service comparable to what they’d been promised leads to a degraded customer experience. This in turn results in lower lifetime value and retention rates, key aspects of shadow loss, among the customer segment affected by the operational event.

Does a successful reroute mean the disruption had no cost?

A successful reroute does not mean a disruption had no cost. Even if orders were delivered successfully, transit times might have been longer, customers or brands might had had to pay higher duties or fees, and customers might have been unable to track packages or receive accurate status updates. However, when an organization has qualified alternatives in place for rapid, smooth rerouting, it will be aware of these issues ahead of time; companies that are improvising backup plans in response to an operational event are more apt to be hit with these unwelcome surprises, as are their customers. 

Why should rerouting be treated as a routine operating capability?

Rerouting needs to be treated as a routine operating capability because increasing geopolitical turmoil and weather volatility mean logistics disruptions are no longer rare. Within the ePost Global network, for instance, the number of reroutes jumped 2,458% in 2025 alone.

What's the difference between an operational event and structural exposure?

Structural exposure refers to the weaknesses inherent in an organization’s shipping program, such as an over-reliance on one carrier or limited capacity. An operational event is a disruption or change that can magnify the impact of the structural exposure. For instance, if workers at a company’s sole carrier go on strike and the business does not have a backup carrier ready to transport its packages, the event has revealed the weakness of the program’s structure.