PSC LIVE: Navigating Supply Chain Risk Through Resilience

Over the past 12 months, the goal of supply chains have shifted from efficiency to resilience.

With ongoing volatility reshaping supply chains, businesses need to prioritise building strength in order to avoid risks.

At Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE: The Net Zero Summit, industry leaders explored strategies for mitigating risk in the face of disruption.

The need for change

Supply chains in 2025 saw ongoing volatility in the way of US tariffs, inflation, climate change and conflict. As a result, the constantly changing environment meant that businesses had to develop flexibility and resilience in order to stay afloat while also remaining competitive.

Much of this came with investments into AI and other digital tools, while some leaders prioritised sustainability initiatives and supply chain traceability. Others developed stronger supplier relationships with collaborative initiatives with total transparency.

A World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks Report revealed that supply chains must become digitally resilient to survive a turbulent global environment, exploring how trade disruption, cyber threats, climate shocks and regulatory divergence are pushing companies to overhaul traditional supply chain models. Through this, they are developing end-to-end visibility, real-time risk sensing and zero-trust cybersecurity across all suppliers and platforms. 

Building resilience throughout the supply chain enables businesses to mitigate shocks and ensure continuity as they face increasing pressures to adapt to sustainability and consumer demands.

Four leaders took to the stage in the Supply Chain Risk & Resilience panel at Procurement & Supply Chain LIVE: The Net Zero Summit. Here, they discussed their own experiences in leading transformation and risk mitigation.

The cost of inaction

Much of this resilience building, to be impactful, comes from a ground-up restructure. It is not enough to simply add on a digital tool or a single sustainability initiative into a fragmented system or a carbon-heavy supply chain. Instead, the most resilient supply chains have a thorough overhaul of their legacy systems and solutions.

As a result, this can be a high-cost measure, making business leaders conscious about acting. Due to its costly nature, some leaders would rather implement smaller, short-term solutions rather than long-term and large-cost changes. However, in doing this, they are failing to build long-term resilience.

This ends up creating larger impacts on their operations, as they fail to implement flexibility or accurate predictions tools across their supply chain. As a result, they are then reacting to events and facing higher responsive costs than being able to predict events and prepare for them.

"I think we recognise that the days of predictable material supply are over; we live in a world of permanent crisis and geopolitical tensions," explained Billy Kingsbury, Chief Executive Officer of thyssenkrupp Materials UK at the panel.

"You've got to build resilience into that supply chain and without it, costs go up, not down. It's something that everybody has to consider in their supply chain right from the start.

"There's various tools out there that we use to do it. We use a digital control tower to give us transparency across our supply chain. When you've got transparency, you can build resilience. With true resilience, yes, there might be upfront cost, but it's actually better than the cost that you're saving when something goes wrong."

When something goes wrong and businesses have not been able to plan for it and mitigate risks, the cost can be felt throughout the supply chain. As brands understand their dependence on consumers and being affordable to consumers – particularly as worldwide inflation is causing people to change their spending habits – being able to keep their prices down is vital for business resilience.

"At Specsavers, cost is really important, and making sure that we can still deliver on affordability for our customers," said Clare McMahon, Head of Environmental Delivery at Specsavers.

"We do have to look within the supply chain and building that resilience amid all these climatic, political risks that we're facing. By finding value in options and materials and working with our supply chain, we've built a very strong and integrated supply chain. We've been working to build that resilience through energy efficiency, material diversification, how we demand plan, and so on."

The role of AI

As businesses look to build resilience and efficiency alongside one another, AI has become an emerging tool to speed up processes without sacrificing supply chain integrity or quality of end result.

"I think we're in a really interesting time period. We're at a point where AI is a big buzzword, I think for a lot of organisations," noted James Rosengren, Transformation - Europe at Mars.

"Everyone wants to invest in it, but what does it actually mean? Understanding what the actual use case is, where it fits with your business, and it's not at the point now for a lot of corporate manufacturing businesses, where we're going to just replace our workforce with AI.

"For us, it's about, how do we take our team away from day to day value execution and give them more time for value creation by enabling them with AI tools."

AI is being implemented to take care of the costly and time-consuming manual work, allowing a human workforce to focus on customer care or creative solutions. These tools can ensure cost savings by increasing productivity within the supply chain operations.

Moreover, with its forecasting capabilities and constant monitoring, it can explore both internal and external risks before they can make an impact. Through its monitoring, it can find risks within the supply base, or it can understand where global risks are emerging. In doing so, it can warn business leaders that a strategy change is needed, before it can impact the company.

"AI will help us mitigate risk," stated Sebastien Juras, Head of Sustainability and Transformation at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

"With the company digital twin, we will be able to structure all the data ecosystem, our own data, but also the one for our customer and our superior. We will be able to improve the sales forecast accuracy. And sales for cash accuracy have a direct impact on resilience. Thanks to the AI, we will be able to burst the impact." 

Through having strong risk mitigation and resilience strategies in place, global businesses can increase their flexibility and build strong operations, even amid volatility. In doing this, they can withstand disruption and respond more successfully to climate pressures.