The instability of economic, political, social and environmental conditions of companies’ activities, reinforced by modern crisis phenomena and increased competition, determine the relevance of developing and implementing complex measures to ensure the stability of the supply chain management systems that these companies participate in. One of the most important tasks of the development and implementation of these complexes is to assess the effectiveness of the relevant measures. The article offers a methodological approach to solving this problem. At the same time, the effectiveness of measures to ensure the stability of the supply chain management system is understood as the degree to which the system's ability to perform its functions is preserved in the face of destructive impacts on its elements. The efficiency indicator is proposed to be mathematically formalized in the form of a function, the argument of which is the change in the duration of the control cycle associated with the need to restore the operability of the elements of the control system. The proposed approach constitutes a theoretical basis for constructing mathematical decision support models when planning measures to counter destructive influences on control systems of a wide class of supply chains. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.