Achilles: Addressing Capability Gaps and Reduce Reliance

Jake Bristow, Sales Director, APAC at Achilles has spoken about installing supply chain resilience. Achilles has been at the forefront of supply chain resilience and sustainability for over three decades, maintaining the same strategic focus of helping clients identify, mitigate and manage risk throughout that time. 

Having delivered outsourcing efficiency and economies of scale benefits to buyers and suppliers in our early years, today Achilles pioneers the use of automation and digitalisation in predicting, identifying and mitigating risk. 

Achilles helps the world’s most responsible businesses drive safe, sustainable and ethical supply chains.  

Jake spoke to Procurement Magazine about the vital role of supplier prequalification, improving visibility and the unique challenges facing teams in Australia.

How can supplier prequalification and risk management tools help organisations address capability gaps and reduce reliance on overseas vendors?

Supplier prequalification is a critical step in building trust with local and regional suppliers.

By assessing financial stability, regulatory compliance, ESG performance and operational resilience before contracts are awarded, organisations reduce exposure to non-performing vendors while broadening and diversifying their supply base.

This creates pathways for strengthening domestic ecosystems and fosters greater confidence in regional partners who might otherwise be overlooked.

Risk management tools extend this by providing early visibility into capability gaps. Procurement leaders can identify weaknesses in supplier practices and take proactive steps to support their development.

Over time, this moves sourcing away from being a one-off transactional activity and toward a structured, ongoing program of monitoring, validation and continuous improvement. The result is greater agility and resilience within supply chains and reduced dependency on distant geographies.

At Achilles, we take a multi-stage approach to supplier qualification and risk management. Our methodology spans environmental and sustainability standards, governance, financial resilience, health and safety, employee welfare, ethics, carbon emissions and cybersecurity.

Beyond self-reported information, we validate documents, cross-reference trusted data sources and monitor suppliers on an ongoing basis to ensure accuracy and compliance remain intact.

AchillesAI enhances this foundation by delivering speed, scale and accuracy. It reads, classifies and extracts supplier data at scale, converting thousands of unstructured documents into structured, auditable insights in real time. It validates supplier documents in multiple languages instantly, streamlining onboarding and reducing the burden of manual checks.

AchillesAI is more than a technology overlay; it is built on a foundation of verified supplier data from over 800 buying organisations and more than 250,000 suppliers worldwide.

This eliminates guesswork and provides results that procurement teams can rely on. By extracting key data from policies and procedures, AchillesAI also auto-fills disclosure templates with ready-to-submit facts and narrative text. This saves time, improves accuracy and helps organisations meet complex regulatory requirements with confidence.

The automation embedded in AchillesAI improves efficiency by up to 70 percent, accelerating adoption and enabling faster connections, fewer delays and a smoother path to compliance for all stakeholders.

By combining rigorous supplier qualification with AI-driven insights, organisations gain access to a comprehensive and validated supplier dataset. This ensures that sourcing is not treated as a one-time exercise but as a continuous safeguard.

The outcome is stronger assurance for stakeholders, greater certainty for procurement teams and more resilient, locally rooted supply chain networks.

With ESG pressures intensifying, what practical steps can procurement teams in Australia take to balance compliance requirements with commercial outcomes?

The key lies in embedding ESG considerations into core procurement processes rather than treating them as standalone obligations.

Practically, this begins with mapping supply chains beyond the first tier to understand risks at deeper levels, then setting clear supplier codes of conduct aligned to international frameworks such as the ISSB and AASB standards.

Procurement teams can also integrate ESG metrics into tender evaluations, ensuring commercial decisions factor in sustainability performance. Finally, fostering supplier collaboration through training and capacity-building initiatives helps ensure compliance is achieved in a way that also drives long-term value and resilience.

To succeed, procurement teams need active stakeholder engagement and commitment from leadership so that ESG is not seen as a compliance exercise but as an enabler of sustainable growth.

Data transparency and traceability are persistent challenges – how is Achilles working with clients to improve visibility across tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers?

True resilience requires visibility beyond tier-1. Achilles supports this by engaging directly with tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers to disclose ESG practices, labour standards, risk indicators and carbon data.

This information is consolidated into a single source of truth, providing procurement leaders with a clear view of vulnerabilities and opportunities deeper in their value chains.

From your perspective, what are the biggest supply chain risks Australian businesses face and how do they differ from challenges in other regions?

Australian businesses face a distinctive set of supply chain risks shaped by geography, regulation and industry structure. The sheer scale of the country, comparable in land mass to the United States but with a population similar to that of Taiwan, creates a structural challenge.

Limited domestic capacity means that procurement professionals often have fewer supplier options, less leverage to drive change and fewer alternatives when a supplier fails to meet required standards.

This dynamic leaves many organisations dependent on doing the best with what they can, often without the level of support that counterparts in Europe or North America can access.

Reliance on overseas suppliers compounds the challenge. Sectors such as manufacturing, construction and energy remain particularly dependent on imports, leaving Australian supply chains highly sensitive to global disruptions.

These may arise from geopolitical tensions, shipping constraints or raw material shortages. At the same time, local climate-related risks such as bushfires, floods and extreme weather events are recurring threats that undermine operational continuity and resilience.

Unlike Europe, where regulatory harmonisation provides a consistent framework, Australia continues to navigate a fragmented and evolving set of standards. The introduction of AASB S1 and AASB S2 has created momentum, yet on-the-ground audits reveal that policy commitments often do not align with implementation.

This highlights the pressing need to strengthen education and raise awareness around the value of rigorous auditing across the supply chain. For many years, ESG initiatives were largely voluntary in Australia, leading to uneven adoption.

As a result, many organisations are only now beginning to appreciate the full scale of their compliance obligations. In most cases, responsibility for sustainability and climate reporting rests with finance, risk or legal teams that are not traditionally equipped to navigate the complexity of emerging disclosure requirements.

This situation frequently results in ESG being treated primarily as a compliance exercise rather than as a lever for value creation. Without clear connections to revenue growth, efficiency gains or investor confidence, such initiatives risk being deprioritised. In addition, industry discussions in Australia often remain domestically focused.

While addressing local issues is vital, it can also narrow perspectives at a time when peers in China, Japan and Europe are moving faster in advancing their sustainability commitments.

For Australian businesses, the challenge and opportunity lie in recognising both the local and global dimensions of supply chain risk. Building resilience requires acknowledging geographic and structural limitations, responding proactively to domestic climate risks and engaging with international benchmarks to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape.