9 Strategies to Reduce Supply Chain Risk

Supply chain risks can have some truly disastrous consequences if they aren’t mitigated as soon as possible. Health and safety hazards, data breaches, criminal activity, issues with suppliers and even natural disasters can disrupt your supply chain.

Risks of all kinds can threaten your company’s financial health, professional standing and the welfare of the people and businesses involved in your production flow. If final products or services are affected by risks being realised, you’re also likely to face a hoard of unhappy customers, and your sales and reputation might take a hit.

So if you’re going to protect your company’s reputation and revenue effectively, supply chain risk management is essential. In the words of Deloitte, “a supply chain is only as strong as your weakest link.” If you’re going to ensure business continuity, you need to boost your supply chain resilience with strategic steps for risk identification and mitigation.

Each stage of your production flow needs to be assessed for risks and precautionary measures should be put in place to prevent disruptions or weaknesses.

We’ve put together nine key strategies that will help you enhance your supply chain risk management approach and protect your business operations.

1: Diversify Your Supplier Base

You’re probably familiar with the saying “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket”. This saying is worth bearing in mind when managing supply chain risk. Using a single supplier means risks are more concentrated, and any issues with your supplier are likely to disrupt your entire supply chain.

By diversifying your supplier base you can spread risks and reduce risk impact. A wider supply network can help you increase your supply chain resilience.

Whether you have a global supply chain or a relatively contained production flow, engaging multiple suppliers, and if possible, suppliers in different locations can help you reduce the risk of localised issues.

Working with different suppliers also allows you to select suppliers and contractors with specialised expertise and find goods and services of the highest quality and best price, helping you ensure your products or services are profitable and of good quality.

2: Have Backup Suppliers at the Ready

In risk management, taking precautionary measures is essential for effectively identifying risks and taking strategic steps to mitigate them. And the same goes for supply chain risk management. It’s important that you take a proactive approach. By planning for the potential impact of possible scenarios, you can ensure business continuity, protecting your company from both internal and external risks.

You never know when one of your business partners might be unable to fulfil their role in your supply chain. There are a whole number of reasons why your suppliers may be unable to complete an order — they may be facing unprecedented demand or they might have issues with their own supply chain. They might even decide to cease operations for one reason or another, such as supplier bankruptcy.

As a supply chain manager, it’s your responsibility to make sure that if you face issues with any of your suppliers, you prevent major disruptions and delays by bringing alternative business partners on board as quickly as possible.

So before any problems occur, make sure you have backup suppliers lined up. Identify suitable suppliers and carry out the same checks you would when choosing a primary supplier.

Ideally, after selecting a supplier, you should enter an agreement with them so that they reserve production capacity in case they are needed during a business disruption. This will enable your company to react faster in the event of problems. Alternatively, you can simply let suppliers know you will keep them on file in case of emergencies, but you face the risk of them having limited availability.

3: Prepare for the Worst with Thorough Supply Chain Risk Management Plans

Just as in all areas of risk management, risk assessments are hugely important in supply chain risk management. You need to identify and assess current and potential risks that could disrupt your supply chain and ultimately, prepare for the worst. Outline control measures that should be taken to limit risks throughout your production flow and prepare responses to foreseeable events and risks that could negatively impact your supply chain.

You should build flexibility into your company processes so they can be adapted if need be to minimise supply chain disruptions. It’s also worth noting that it’s not possible to plan and prepare for every possible scenario. So your supply chain risk management strategy should prioritise by probability and impact, and implement control measures and contingency plans for situations that are most likely or would have the biggest impact on your business.

4: Aim for End-To-End Supply Chain Visibility

Your supply chain probably involves many different operational stages, and each stage faces its own risks and challenges. If something were to go wrong in one of these stages, the last thing you want is to only find out about issues later down the production line, or even worse at the last minute before the final product or service is delivered to the buyer.

The sooner you’re aware of any issues, the sooner you can deal with them and prevent them from disrupting or delaying the supply chain, or affecting the quality of final products or services. So supply chain visibility is hugely important when it comes to mitigating risks.

Supply chain visibility is about knowing where inventory is on its journey through your supply chain, and if any issues are going to affect the delivery timeline. This information might be exclusively available for your supply chain risk management team to see, or customers may be able to see this information too. With this visibility, you can track the progress of orders and ensure quick responses to any issues.

Another form of visibility that can help you reduce supply chain risks is visibility into the financial stability of your suppliers. Acquiring financial reports during the procurement process can help you choose financially stable suppliers, reducing the risk of corruption, bribery, and financial issues affecting production processes.

5: Create a Risk-Aware Culture

Supply chain risk management is a far simpler and easier task when it becomes a collaborative process. By creating a risk-aware culture, you can ensure all workers and business partners involved in your production flow support the highest risk management standards, helping you reduce the risk of supply chain disruption.

You can make sure your entire supply chain is compliant and supportive of your risk mitigation strategies by embracing training materials, encouraging open communication and setting clear expectations and benchmarks.

Training materials can help you educate employees about supply chain risks and encourage staff compliance with risk management policies. Meanwhile, communicating honestly and openly about risks and how to implement better management systems can help you position supply chain risk management as a priority. The more your employees and partners hear you talk about risk identification and mitigation, the more aware they’ll be of relevant issues and how to tackle them.

6: Share Responsibility by Including Partners in Risk Planning

When planning how to mitigate risk, it’s a good idea to include suppliers and partners in the process. They may have unique insights into the risks your supply chain faces and can help create effective solutions. You will also need to ensure your suppliers’ risk management and business continuity strategies align with yours.

By including partners throughout the supply chain risk management process, you can make sure you’re all on the same page, aware of the risks that need to be managed, and the control measures that should be implemented.

7: Review Supply Chain Risks Periodically

Your supply chain risk management strategies will only be effective if they’re up to date and relevant to your supply chain operations. So carrying out a risk assessment once simply won’t cut it. You need to regularly review supply chain risks and ensure control measures and planned responses to different scenarios are still relevant.

You should review your supply chain risks at least once a year or whenever changes are made to your supply chain and production processes. For example, if you start working with a new supplier, or changes are made to the manufacturing or delivery processes, you’ll need to assess any new hazards.

8: Ensure Your Company Is Properly Insured with Relevant and Reliable Cover

When you have relevant business insurance policies in place, you can rest easy knowing that should any disruptions occur, you have support in the event of financial loss. For example, professional indemnity insurance, contractors liability cover and even cyber liability insurance are all types of policies that give your business an added layer of risk management.

Your insurance shouldn’t be seen as a core feature of your supply chain risk management strategy — ideally, you never want to use it. Your other control measures should prevent issues from causing you to claim. But it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. With proper cover in place, you can rest assured knowing that if your control measures fail to prevent risks from being realised, you’re still protected.

At CHAS, access to leading business insurance is just one of the benefits we offer our members. We’ve teamed up with Marsh Commercial to offer our members a straightforward and great-value business insurance solution. We make sure companies can get the protection they need, from a reliable provider.

9: Make Use of Supply Chain Risk Management Services

Mitigating supply chain risks is a big task, but you don’t have to tackle it alone. There are plenty of supply chain risk management services that can help you streamline the process.

Accreditation programmes, such as the CHAS Common Assessment Standard, can help you mitigate risks throughout your supply chain and comply with risk management standards and regulations. As a CHAS contractor, you can become accredited through the Common Assessment standard to demonstrate your compliance to clients. Or as a CHAS client, you can easily find accredited contractors who have demonstrated their compliance in risk management.

We have a range of supply chain risk management services that are completely free to CHAS Clients and will give you real-time updates and alerts on the compliance status of your supply chain partners. All you need to do is sign up for a CHAS Client account. 

Alternatively, you can become a CHAS contractor and gain access to industry-leading accreditation schemes and risk management resources, including training modules, risk assessment templates, business shield support and more.