amfori: The Risk Management Playbook
Supply chains have never been more exposed. Regulatory change, geopolitical instability and mounting ESG scrutiny mean procurement and sustainability teams can no longer treat risk management as an afterthought.
Research from Proxima, part of Bain & Company, underscores this, with less than 40% of businesses currently having real-time visibility into their operations, and 56% of CEOs say between 11% and 20% of their revenue would be at risk if their top three suppliers faced just two weeks of disruption.
A new whitepaper from amfori, The Risk Management Playbook: The First Steps in Building Sustainable and Resilient Supply Chains, sets out why a proactive approach is now essential and offers a structured route to get there.
Risk management is everyone's job
One of the whitepaper's points is stark: research cited in the report suggests that the vast majority of organisations still manage risk through siloed departments and disconnected spreadsheets.
amfori argues that fragmentation creates blind spots that let issues escalate long before they are caught, often turning manageable problems into full-blown disruptions by the time they surface.
The playbook makes the case for treating risk management as a shared, cross-functional responsibility, spanning procurement, product development, operations, compliance, communications and sustainability alike.
No single department, it argues, has the full picture on its own. Coordinated risk management does not just protect against disruption, it becomes a catalyst for sustainability performance, with the report pointing to measurable gains in cost efficiency, revenue growth and brand value when businesses get it right.
The scale of the challenge
The report points to the fact supply chain disruption can wipe out a significant share of annual profits, with extreme events costing the global economy hundreds of billions of pounds. Yet only a small minority of firms feel properly prepared to respond, despite most having faced disruption in recent years.
That preparedness gap sits at the heart of the whitepaper's argument for moving away from reactive firefighting.
The whitepaper looks at how risk multiplies the further a company looks beyond its direct, tier-one suppliers and why so many businesses still struggle to trace issues back to their root causes in the lower tiers of their supply chains.
A structured path forward
Rather than leaving readers to figure out where to start, the playbook breaks proactive risk management into a series of practical stages, from mapping supply chains and assessing exposure, through to verification, mitigation and reporting.
Each stage is illustrated with real-world examples, including how multi-tier mapping plays out in the fashion industry, and why relying on audits alone is rarely enough to catch issues that emerge between assessment cycles.
The report also draws on insight from JYSK, the household goods retailer, on how its own approach to environmental risk assessment has evolved over time.
As Søren Lip ter Beek, Compliance Manager at JYSK, explains: "We began using amfori BEPI in 2020. At first, we explored the available tools through environmental risk assessments." That gradual, evolving approach, the whitepaper suggests, is typical of how mature risk management programmes tend to develop in practice.
For procurement, supply chain, and sustainability professionals looking to move from reactive firefighting to proactive resilience, the full playbook offers the detailed roadmap needed to get started, download it here to explore all five steps.
Download the full whitepaper today to begin building a more sustainable and resilient supply chain network.
