Guides & Reports

Protect your supply chain and your bottom line

The COVID-19 pandemic is creating commercial challenges previously unimaginable for businesses across the globe.

But now as workforces adapt to remote working, businesses are turning their attention outside of their virtual four walls to the external commercial risks posed by the pandemic.

And for procurement it means there will be two pressing priorities to deal with right now:

Ensuring supply chain continuity

Your supply chain partners will undoubtedly be experiencing severe turbulence of their own, whether that’s keeping their cash flowing as customer orders dry up, or coping with unprecedented demand due to the relevance of their products or services in the fight against the virus. That means you will need to ensure you have cover in place quickly for any supply chain continuity risk, for example:

• Awarding contingency contracts in business critical spend categories
• Completing emergency tender processes should existing supply partners fail to meet their obligations to you

Find cost savings to ease the pressure on the bottom line

On the reverse of your supply risk, is your sales risk, and for the majority of organisations turnover will be under severe pressure for the next few months. This means that cost margins will be under the microscope more than ever, as procurement looks to find new spend savings opportunities. So as a team you’ll need to be working fast:

• Increasing your ability to complete more supplier renewal renegotiations, but with the same (or even less) procurement headcount
• Stopping contract rollovers your business doesn’t want, and reducing more of your expensive off-contract spend