The COVID-19 pandemic. The Suez Canal blockage. The Russia-Ukraine war. The Strait of Hormuz crisis. Semiconductor shortages. Rare earth metal scarcity. Such disruptions, once considered exceptional, are now becoming the norm. And yet, most supply chains were largely designed in the 1980s and 1990s with the primary objective of Efficiency.

The question procurement leaders must ask today is no longer “how do I be more efficient?” but rather “how do I survive the next disruption, and recover faster than my competitors?” According to Manish Shanbhag, supply chain expert at EIPM (European Institute of Purchasing Management), this shift is fundamental: from optimising for efficiency alone to building “intelligent adaptability”, the ability to absorb shocks, reconfigure quickly, and recover faster.

In a recent EIPM webinar on supply chain resilience, Shanbhag outlined a clear and actionable framework for procurement professionals ready to lead this transformation. Here are the 5 strategic levers that can help your organisation make the leap.

Lever #1: Build Network Flexibility via Smart Sourcing

The first and most powerful lever is rethinking your sourcing strategy. A supply chain that depends on a single supplier, or a single geography, is inherently fragile. Network flexibility means designing deliberate redundancy into your supplier base through dual sourcing, multi-sourcing, and regionalisation strategies.

In practice, for example in the European context, this might mean maintaining a primary supplier in Southeast Asia for cost efficiency, while securing a secondary supplier closer to home, in France or Germany, as a strategic backup. Quota allocation, geographic diversification, and flexible logistics contracts all contribute to a more resilient network structure.

“If you’re depending too much on one supplier, what can you do in order to move away from that situation? That’s network flexibility.”,

Actionable tip: Conduct a single-point-of-failure audit across your critical categories. One procurement manager Shanbhag cited identified 8 to 9 single points of failure in his category and immediately built action plans to address the top five. That exercise alone can transform your resilience posture.

This network redesign sets the foundation, but flexibility alone isn’t enough. You also need to secure the capacity to operate when demand surges or supply tightens.

Lever #2: Treat Strategic Buffers as Your Insurance Policy

In the pursuit of leaner operations, many organisations have eliminated safety stocks and buffer inventories. In today’s volatile environment, that logic needs revisiting. Strategic buffers are not waste; they are insurance policies.

The key distinction is between wasteful stock (which should be reduced) and strategic buffer stock (which should be protected). Identifying which commodities and components require a buffer, and locking capacity with suppliers contractually, is one of the most concrete steps procurement teams can take toward resilience.

Capacity strategy also includes dynamic safety stock models that are reviewed regularly alongside supplier negotiations.

“Buffers become your insurance policy. The benefits far outweigh the cost burdens that come with setting up such a system.”,

Actionable tip: Review your current safety stock policy for your top 10 strategic SKUs. For each one, ask: Is this a resilience buffer or a wasteful overstock? Then explore capacity reservation clauses with your key suppliers, yes, it may come with a premium, but it can protect you during the next shortage.

With your network flexible and your buffers secured, the next challenge is visibility: you can’t protect what you can’t see.

Lever #3: Invest in End-to-End Visibility Beyond Tier 1

Most procurement teams have reasonable visibility into their direct (Tier 1) suppliers. But many a times, disruptions do not originate there. They surface upstream, at Tier 2, Tier 3, sometimes further. Building genuine resilience requires transparency across the entire supply chain.

Modern digital tools, AI-powered monitoring platforms, control towers, digital twins, early warning systems, are making this increasingly achievable. The goal is to detect potential disruptions before they materialise: a Tier 2 supplier showing financial distress, a Tier 3 raw material source facing political instability. With the right systems, you can spot these signals a few months in advance and act proactively rather than reactively.

“If you have the right systems in place, you can predict the bankruptcy of a Tier 2 or even a Tier 3 supplier a few months earlier. That already gives you a few months to prepare your response.”, Manish Shanbhag, EIPM

Actionable tip: Map your supply chain beyond Tier 1 for your top three most critical commodities. Now, mapping beyond Tier 2 may be challenging. One way could be to look at the bill of materials. With this, you can create a theoretical SC associated with your BOM, see the impact of different factors on it and then assess the vulnerability. Even a basic mapping exercise will likely reveal surprising concentrations of risk. Then explore which digital tools can help you monitor those nodes on an ongoing basis.

Visibility tells you where the problems are. What you do with that information depends on your relationships, which brings us to the fourth lever.

Lever #4: Build a Collaborative Supplier Ecosystem

Resilience is not a solo sport. One of the most common misconceptions is that supply chain resilience is the responsibility of a single company. It is a shared responsibility, one that requires genuine collaboration with suppliers, and sometimes with clients too.

The most resilient supply chains are built on trust, data sharing, joint risk planning, and financial transparency with key partners. Toyota’s response to the Aisin Seiki factory fire in the late 1990s is a masterclass in this approach: when a critical supplier was destroyed, over 150 partner companies rallied to rebuild production capacity, and Toyota resumed operations in just five days.

Today, forward-thinking procurement teams are formalising this collaboration through joint risk planning sessions, shared forecasting, financial health monitoring of Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers, and risk-sharing clauses embedded directly in contracts.

“It’s a shared responsibility. We are not doing all the solutions on our own. Joint planning, financial transparency, and exchange of data are what the best resilient supply chains are built on.”

Actionable tip: Identify your top five strategic suppliers and schedule a dedicated resilience conversation, not a performance review, but a joint risk planning session. What are their vulnerabilities? What would they need from you to recover faster in a crisis?

The final lever is internal, and it’s often the one that makes or breaks the entire strategy.

Lever #5: Develop Decision Agility

When a disruption hits, the bottleneck isn’t necessarily a supplier. Often, it is internal governance. Slow approvals, siloed departments, unclear escalation paths, these cost precious hours and days when speed is everything.

Resilient organisations invest in decision agility: the ability to make faster, cross-functional decisions under pressure. This means establishing crisis cells or “war rooms” before a crisis occurs, running scenario planning and simulation exercises, and creating pre-approved procurement decision frameworks that don’t require a lengthy validation chain during an emergency.

Decision agility also requires a cultural shift. Many organisations have solid resilience plans on paper that collapse in execution because cost-saving incentives dominate. Embedding resilience into procurement KPIs, supplier resilience scorecards, time-to-recover metrics, alongside traditional PPV savings, is what makes the strategy real.

“A lot of the times, companies have everything well done on paper, but when it comes to execution, cost savings become the priority again. Procurement objectives must shift to include a supplier resilience scorecard.”

Actionable tip: Review your procurement team’s current KPIs. If resilience metrics are absent, propose adding at least one, such as the number of single points of failure addressed or the time-to-recover from the last disruption. Culture follows measurement.

Conclusion: Resilience Is Now a Competitive Advantage

These five levers, network flexibility, strategic capacity management, end-to-end visibility, collaborative ecosystems, and decision agility, form the backbone of a resilient procurement function. None of them operates in isolation. The strongest supply chains activate all five in a coordinated, prioritised manner.

The goal is not to build a supply chain that is 100% disruption-proof; that is neither realistic nor necessary. The goal, as Manish Shanbhag puts it, is to absorb, reconfigure, and recover faster than your competition. In a world of structural disruptions, that capacity is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the new competitive advantage.

Ready to assess your own resilience posture? Start with a single-point-of-failure audit in your most critical category. Map your Tier 2 and Tier 3 exposure. Challenge your team to think beyond cost savings. The companies that make this shift today will be the ones maintaining service continuity and winning client trust when the next disruption arrives.