Before 2020, the supply chain may have been something of an afterthought for the owners and leaders of many small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Organizational leaders knew the company’s key suppliers, kept an eye on monthly purchasing costs and may have helped resolve delays or other minor disruptions that popped up from time to time. But for the most part, so long as everything was running smoothly — and it usually was — logistics were not a top concern for the C-suite. It was the domain of operations and warehouse managers (or, increasingly, third-party logistics partners).
Of course, that all changed in 2021 when widespread shortages and delays began affecting businesses around the world and across industries. Since then, the supply chain has become a front-and-center issue at the highest levels of a business. Events like a grounded container ship blocking the Suez Canal, wildfires in Canada, mounting geopolitical tensions and ongoing labor shortages have emphasized the point.
For a growing business, the impact of not having inventory to sell or materials to manufacture goods can be devastating. While the acute supply chain disruptions of the pandemic have eased, smaller organizations often lack the cash reserves of large enterprises, making them particularly vulnerable to the consequences of delays and shortages.
Leaders are acutely aware of the need for a clear strategy to reduce risks in their supply chain, and they should also know they must continuously evaluate and improve upon that strategy. We consulted supply chain experts to develop a clear picture of the risks business leaders need to consider when assessing their suppliers, what they can do to mitigate those risks and how technology can assist in these efforts.
What Are Supply Chain Risks?
Supply chain risks encompass various threats that can disrupt the flow of goods and services within a supply chain network. These risks include economic factors, like supplier bankruptcies and downturns; natural disasters and other environmental concerns; political instability and geopolitical tension; ethical concerns, such as child labor; and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. To mitigate these risks, businesses can employ strategies, such as supply chain mapping, weighted ranking, value at risk (VaR) assessment, supplier segmentation, diversification, inventory management adjustments, scenario planning and building strong supplier relationships, to ensure resilience and continuity in their supply chain operations. to ensure resilience and continuity in their supply chain operations.
Key Takeaways
- The COVID-19 pandemic and other disruptions have highlighted the critical role of supply chains in business operations, making it essential for leaders to prioritize supply chain risk management.
- Supply chain risks fall into four main categories — economic, environmental, political and ethical — with examples including supplier bankruptcies, natural disasters, political unrest and ethical concerns, such as sourcing from companies with poor labor practices.
- Businesses should assess supplier risks by using techniques, such as supply chain mapping, weighted ranking, value at risk (VaR) analysis and supplier segmentation, to understand and quantify potential vulnerabilities.
- Mitigating supply chain risks involves diversifying supplier bases, adjusting inventory management strategies, considering scenario planning and building strong supplier relationships to enhance resilience and minimize disruptions.
Supply Chain Risks Continue Mounting
Most of the risks that could disrupt your operations fall into four broad categories of supply chain challenges: economic, environmental, political and ethical:
- Economic issues are a supplier going bankrupt, a recession or a work stoppage at a key manufacturing partner.
- Environmental problems include natural disasters, like a flood, earthquake or drought.
- Political risks could be civil unrest or a new leader who implements steep tariffs or puts restrictions on exports.
- Ethical concerns include using child labor, forced labor or sourcing raw materials from a company that fails to give its workers the necessary protective equipment.
These are not new issues, though many of them have become more prevalent. For example, data from international disaster database EM-DAT shows the frequency of natural disasters has steadily increased over the past 20 years. At the same time, concerns that could be broadly classified as environmental, social and governance (ESG) have come into focus.
Take, for instance, the provenance of products. A growing group of consumers wants to know where goods originated and that they were made with sustainable and ethical practices. Similarly, environmental risks now extend beyond natural disasters to sustainability. If a company is dumping waste in waters or releasing harmful toxins in violation of local regulations, that could lead to a fine or even a forced shutdown.
Additionally, cybersecurity has become a much bigger threat in a business environment that relies heavily on technology to coordinate and manage activities, said Steven Melnyk, a professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University. For smaller companies, protecting against cyber threats comes down to choosing software vendors that follow leading cybersecurity practices.
3 Strategies to Assess the Risk of Your Suppliers
SMBs need to know how the suppliers they work with directly — tier 1 suppliers — stack up in each of these categories. Leading organizations will look upstream to their tier 2 and tier 3 suppliers, but that often comes later. Achieving any level of insight is a big step in the right direction.
To reinforce their supplier networks, companies should first understand which types of risks various partners present and the degree of risk in each case. This is often not an easy or fast exercise, but it’s critical.
To assess the risks of your suppliers, consider these strategies:
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Basic Supply Chain Mapping
Before you can evaluate suppliers (and perhaps your suppliers’ suppliers), you need to map out who they are, what they provide and where they’re located. Collaborate with colleagues across your organization as you build this map to avoid overlooking a few suppliers, especially if they provide a few small items. You can create a basic map of these links in a spreadsheet or certain supply chain software. It’s important to update the map regularly as you add partners and stop working with others.
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Weighted Ranking
You can use a basic system that assigns weighted importance to risk factors like economic or political disruption, financial dependence, credit history and natural disasters, said Jack Cunningham, a purchasing manager at a global consumer products company. If you choose to use this system, you’ll give each of those factors a weighted importance and each supplier a score of 1-5 for each (with 5 representing the highest risk). Then you’ll calculate the weighted average (opens in a new tab) of those numbers to come up with a score that represents a supplier’s total risk — and compare the scores of various partners.of those numbers to come up with a score that represents a supplier’s total risk — and compare the scores of various partners.
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Value at risk (VaR)
The Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) has a metric called “value at risk” as part of its Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model, and it’s another way for businesses to compare the amount of risk that various suppliers present. A company will consider categories of risks — whether they be risks related to politics, weather, ethical practices, quality or other categories — and assign probabilities to the likelihood of occurrence. For example, if there’s a 10% chance that a hurricane will hit a particular geography, the supplier in that region is your only provider of a certain component and the value of the product affected would be $3 million, then the VaR is $300,000 (0.1 x $3,000,000). Based on these calculations, your company might shift orders to less risky regions or carry enough inventory to cover typical recovery times.
A Note About Segmenting Suppliers
When using any of these techniques, factor in the importance of various suppliers to your business. You can segment suppliers into groups, much like an ABC inventory analysis. A partner in the A segment might make a key component for a consistent bestseller, while one in the C segment could offer an easily replaceable product. You shouldn’t necessarily base this ranking on sales alone: A critical supplier in a part of the world with minimal risk may still warrant lots of attention because you’d see a substantial revenue drop if that supplier weren’t able to deliver. At the same time, sourcing a few noncritical or easily replaced components in a high-risk area may not be a major concern.
7 Strategies to Mitigate Supplier Risks
While there’s no completely fool-proof plan to eliminate supplier risks, companies can still prepare themselves with proactive strategies that address potential vulnerabilities. The following seven approaches can help mitigate supply chain risks, helping organizations contain the effects of most any scenario that comes their way.
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Diversify your supplier base.
Once an organization has assessed the risk of its supply chain partners, the best way to build resilience is to diversify its supplier base. That means finding redundant suppliers for key parts and materials that are located in different parts of the world so, for instance, a hurricane in a certain region doesn’t halt all shipments of a crucial material. It could also mean finding partners closer to home — maybe not in the same country but on the same continent.
Localizing Your Supply Chain (opens in a new tab): Understand the potential benefits, major costs to consider, potential barriers to relocation and steps to take if you decide to onshore.
Identifying and onboarding a supplier could take anywhere from weeks to a year or more, according to experts we interviewed. A new supplier for a commodity, like a ball bearing, could be live in a week, while one that provides a specialty part for highly regulated products, like medical devices, could take a year or longer due to strict standards and testing, said Tony Nuzio, founder and CEO of consultancy ICC Logistics Services.
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Modify Your Inventory Planning and Management Strategy
Modifying your inventory planning and management strategy is another way to increase resilience. You’ve likely already considered this: Many manufacturers, distributors and retailers are struggling to decide how much inventory to carry to mitigate the impact of inevitable supply chain snags. Over the past quarter century or so, many products-based companies have adopted a just-in-time (JIT) inventory strategy. Organizations practicing JIT attempt to stock only materials and goods they expect to sell, along with a small buffer of safety stock — aka just-in-case (JIC) inventory — in an effort to reduce costs. This hybrid approach allows businesses to not overspend on excess inventory yet also provides a bit of a cushion in case of unexpected demand or a supply chain disruption.
Procurement teams will and should continue to use the economic order quantity (EOQ) formula to calculate ideal order sizes, reorder point (ROP) to determine when to place orders and safety stock to figure out the right amount of buffer stock. There are far more advanced models, but these are the starting points for finding ideal inventory levels, or inventory forecasting.
Inventory Forecasting Formulas and Examples
Formula Sample Data Example Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) √ [(2 × Costs per order x Annual demand) / Annual holding costs] Order cost=$5,000, Annual demand=10,000 units, Holding costs=$3 per unit EOQ = √ [(2 x $5,000 x 10,000) / $3] = 5,774 units Safety Stock (Maximum daily usage x Maximum lead time) – (Average daily usage x Average lead time) Max daily usage=100, Max lead time=20 days, Average daily usage=70, Average lead time=14 days Safety stock = (100 x 20) – (70 x 14) = 1,020 units Reorder Point (ROP) (Number of units used daily x Number of days lead time) + Number of units safety stock Units used daily=70, Lead time=14 days, Safety stock=1,020 units Reorder point = (70 x 14) + 1020 = 2,000 units Even as businesses consider holding more inventory, it doesn’t make financial sense to increase stock on-hand for every SKU, nor is it feasible for most. Here are a few ideas to help you determine the ideal amount of buffer inventory to keep in your warehouses:
ABC inventory analysis
A simple ABC inventory analysis is a great way to find out which products pull the most weight for your business. Those select items that make up the majority of your revenue or profit fall into the A category, the next-biggest sellers are in the B group and the least popular items are in the C group. Companies often find A products represent 70% to 80% of all sales, B items 15% to 20% and C goods just 5% to 10%. Cunningham, the purchasing manager, said that in his experience, 20% of products usually account for 80% of sales, reflecting the Pareto principle, or “80-20 rule.” It makes sense to carry larger quantities of those A products, or the components needed to make them, because your business will take the biggest hit without them. On the other hand, certain SKUs in the C group might not be worth selling if it costs more to continue offering them than the profit they drive.
Calculating inventory carrying costs
It’s essential to have a strong grasp on carrying costs, or the expenses associated with keeping items on-hand. There are a lot of expenses to consider when calculating carrying costs: storage, insurance, taxes, labor, shrinkage, obsolescence and more. Opportunity cost is an important consideration here because money tied up in inventory could have been spent elsewhere, like on a marketing campaign or a new hire. But some products are more expensive than others to hold, and managers need to know those costs at the item-level as they make stocking decisions. They can then weigh those carrying costs against the value of potential lost sales and determine whether the projected revenue justifies the expenses.
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Recognize the Potential of Scenario Planning
Interest in scenario planning surged after so many organizations were blindsided in 2020. Companies want to be better prepared for the next disruption, and scenario-planning tools can help by projecting the financial effects of, say, a key customer leaving, receiving no orders from two suppliers for three months or a sudden surge in demand. Awareness of the financial impact of best-case, worst-case and average-case outcomes can inform decisions about how much inventory to carry. Decisions are based on data rather than best guesses.
Scenario Planning: Strategies, Steps & Practical Examples (opens in a new tab): Get a full rundown on how to choose the scenario-planning framework that works best for your team, as well as detailed examples.
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Treat Your Suppliers Like True Business Partners
As should be clear at this point, your success is dependent on your suppliers, shipping carriers and everyone else that plays a role in your supply chain. You need to remember this as you strengthen your supply chain. It may require shifting the way you think about suppliers, from simply “the person we buy something from” to a true strategic partner.
At the heart of this is the age-old art of relationship building. Wherever possible, take the time to get to know your primary point of contact at each supplier.
This small investment of time and money could pay dividends down the road. If an issue arises, who is the supplier more likely to alert: the person who simply submits purchase orders or the one who knows their name and calls to check in every month? One procurement leader said without the close relationships he built with Chinese suppliers, his business would have been in serious trouble when the pandemic hit.
To earn priority treatment, supply chain leaders need to make an effort to understand their partners’ businesses and what they can do to be a great customer. A personalized approach to each supplier will make it clear that you value them and view this as a mutually beneficial relationship.
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Invest in Technology and Automation
While investing in new tech takes upfront cash, a smart approach is to take a hard look at where your company’s tech capabilities stand right now and then map out a step-by-step plan to bring in the right tools to tackle their biggest risk hotspots first. Options to consider include blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), each of which can provide the much-needed visibility, transparency and control to help mitigate supply chain risks.
Blockchain creates a secure, decentralized record of transactions that can’t be altered, providing a clear trail of every step in the supply chain journey. This makes it much easier to pinpoint the source of any issues, such as defective products or ethical concerns, like the use of child labor or conflict minerals. With heightened transparency, companies can take targeted actions to address problems, demonstrate responsible sourcing and build trust with increasingly ESG-conscious consumers and investors.
AI-driven analytics tools can crunch huge volumes of supply chain data to spot patterns and potential problems before they happen. This predictive power makes it possible to proactively tweak plans to sidestep shortages or snags, so that business runs smoothly. AI can also keep a watchful eye on supplier performance and raise red flags if factors like product quality and lead time aren’t up to snuff.
Meanwhile, IoT devices, like smart sensors and RFID tags, can beam back real-time intel on where goods are, what condition they’re in and whether they’re on track to arrive on time. This granular, up-to-the-minute view of the supply chain is gold for supply chain managers looking to optimize stock levels, cut the risk of loss or damage in transit and make sure deliveries land on schedule. And, if integrated properly, IoT data can make AI forecasts even sharper.
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Develop Contingency Plans
Even the best-laid plans can go awry, but robust contingency plans can be used to deal with potential disruptions. These plans should cover a range of scenarios, from minor hiccups to full-blown crises, and clearly outline the steps to take to minimize impact and keep things moving. Start by identifying the most critical risks to your supply chain, whether it’s potential natural disasters, a supplier’s financial instability, trade negotiations or transportation snafus. Then, for each risk, map out a detailed response plan that includes:
- Key stakeholders to alert and involve in the response.
- Alternative suppliers or transportation routes to turn to.
- An inventory reallocation strategy or emergency production plan.
- Communication protocols for keeping customers and partners informed.
- Financial safeguards or insurance policies to activate.
It’s not enough to just have these plans on paper — supply chain teams need to regularly review and update them as conditions change. It’s also important to run through real-world simulations that stress-test their effectiveness. This helps identify any gaps or weak spots in the plans while building the “muscle memory” needed to quickly and confidently spring into action when disruption strikes. And be sure to collaborate with other departments, like sales, finance and customer service, to ensure contingency plans are aligned. A seamless, coordinated response is only possible when everyone is working from the same playbook.
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Seek Insurance and Financial Safeguards
Some risks are simply unavoidable. That’s where insurance and financial safeguards come into play. Though they come at a cost, measures like supply chain insurance, trade credit insurance and contingency funds can protect the bottom line and support business continuity in the face of unexpected events.
Supply chain insurance can cover losses from a wide range of disruptions, from natural disasters and supplier bankruptcies to cargo theft. When selecting a policy, work closely with the insurance provider to guarantee adequate coverage for the risks and potential losses specific to your business. Be sure to review and update your policy regularly, as your supply chain evolves. Trade credit insurance is another useful option, particularly for companies with many suppliers or customers. This type of insurance protects against nonpayment by customers, helping to mitigate the risk of bad debt and maintain a healthy cash flow.
With a contingency fund and/or flexible credit line in place, businesses can cover unexpected costs and maintain operations during supply chain disruptions. To establish a contingency fund, set aside a portion of profits into a dedicated account. The idea is to create a financial cushion to draw on during supply chain disruptions. Flexible credit lines can be established through your bank; they provide quick access to capital when needed, but you’ll likely have to pay interest and fees.
How to Find the Right Suppliers: As your supply chain becomes increasingly intricate, look for certain traits in your partners to avert problems down the line.
Your Complete Guide to Inventory Forecasting
Which Supply Chain Technology Do You Need?
Many of the steps you can take to strengthen your supply chain depend on access to up-to-date, reliable information. A few critical systems can help you track all the nodes in your supply chain, providing a real-time picture of your end-to-end operations.
To get started, growing businesses should invest in tools for inventory management and procurement. Inventory management systems are essential in improving inventory planning and analysis, especially as companies consider keeping more items on-hand. Procurement software can help you keep tabs on all of your suppliers by showing the performance, contacts and transaction history for each. Companies that manufacture will see a quick return on their investment with a manufacturing solution that helps plan production runs and ensures they have enough capacity to meet demand. One other core piece is a demand planning application that can help forecast future sales based on historical sales data and other inputs from complementary systems.
Collectively, these systems are often referred to as supply chain management (SCM) software because they help businesses manage the entire flow of goods, from sub-suppliers through delivery to end users. Together they record a great deal of information that can be culled into digestible dashboards and reports. For example, how often are supplier shipments arriving late? How fast are products in a certain category turning, and at the current pace, when will you run out? Tracking this data will also reveal shifts in supply and demand that you can use to produce accurate, trustworthy forecasts so you’re prepared for the future.
SCM systems are typically integrated with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform that provides a global view of your business — not just operations but also finance, HR, sales and marketing and more. The ERP allows leaders to see how changes or issues in their supply chain affect other aspects of the organization, like cash flow and cost of goods sold. That level of detail is absolutely crucial for businesses that want to build a more resilient supply chain without straining their bottom line.
Minimize Supply Chain Risks With NetSuite
NetSuite’s supply chain management software aims to keep operations running smoothly, ensuring that all workers and materials are available at the right time and place. NetSuite procurement capabilities drive accuracy throughout the purchasing process, while supporting collaboration with suppliers. In addition, integrated demand planning, inventory management and predictive analytics optimize supply chain strategies and streamline tasks to ensure that supply plans are executed without disruption and products are delivered as promised.
The years since 2021 illustrate why SMB business leaders can’t turn their attention away from their supply chains. The connection between supply chain management and financial success, even solvency, is now crystal-clear.
Top decision-makers must be involved in efforts to strengthen the supply chain. They need to realize that risk and reliability are critical factors when making any decision related to their supply chain and adapt accordingly. At the same time, they should recognize the value of establishing trust and goodwill with new suppliers and strengthening relationships with existing ones.
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Supply Chain Risk FAQs
What are the risks of the supply chain?
Supply chain risks encompass a range of potential disruptions and threats, including economic risks (e.g., supplier bankruptcies, economic downturns), environmental risks (e.g., natural disasters, climate change), political risks (e.g., political instability, trade policy changes), ethical risks (e.g., sourcing from companies with unethical practices) and cybersecurity risks (e.g., cyberattacks and data breaches).
What is causing supply chain issues in 2025?
Supply chain issues in 2025 are related to various factors, including extreme weather events, trade disputes, labor shortages, geopolitical instability and high inflation rates.
What are the US supply chain issues?
Supply chain issues in the U.S. can include challenges related to transportation and logistics, labor shortages, disruptions caused by natural disasters, trade policies and cybersecurity threats. These issues can impact various industries and sectors within the U.S. supply chain.
