Three key takeaways 

Map your supply chain.

“It is about understanding your relationships and the business of your business partners,” says McCaffery. “Mapping the supply chain is critically important for everyone to do. It is another one of these time consuming things that we haven’t always necessarily done in the past. It’s a matter of really understanding who your immediate suppliers are and who is in behind that.” 

Straw says adding your alternative suppliers to your map with key details about their capacity and timelines will help your company start to develop a backup plan in case a disruption happens.   

Understand the external risks of your supply chain.

When you’re building out a strategic plan for your supply chain, it is critical to understand the unique external risks your company faces. One risk Canadians companies will face as the post-pandemic recovery gets underway is responding to increased demand fast enough, says McCaffery. Those companies who understand their supply chain risks and how to manage them will be better positioned to take advantage of the recovery period.

He says to consider risks in three broad categories:

• Demand. These include a loss of major accounts, volatility of demand, the concentration of your customer base, innovative customers and buying too much or too little.
• Environment. There are environmental factors always in play, says McCaffery. Whether natural disasters, terrorist attacks, political and social unrest, regulatory changes, or labour disruptions, the potential for these factors to disrupt your business exist throughout your supply chain.
• Supply. Risks in this category are dependent on key suppliers, supplier downtime, consolidation in supply markets, quality issues, and potential disruptions. “It’s time to really look at building up your suppliers more broadly,” says McCaffery. 

Building relationships with your suppliers.

“Suppliers need to be a partner with you. They need to understand what you’re trying to do. When you think about it, everybody is a customer of someone in your supply chain. You have to be thinking about what I want to know about my customers, they want to know about me because they want to walk away with a sale and have you be successful, so there is a partnership there,” says Straw. 

In the past, the relationships with suppliers in some industries have been a bit more adversarial, says McCaffery, but that’s changing with the current global realities. 

“Procurement isn’t just about buying something and getting it where it needs to be when it needs to be there for the right price. There are a lot of relationship elements to it. When we get busy and we have a high volume of stuff to buy, things like building relationships tend to go out the window because it’s more operational. We really need to take a step back from that and stop hiding behind contracts. We have to start working together in a different way,” he says.