Jabil's Priya Anand on Making Resilience Operational

Procurement leaders have never had to deal with more volatility than right now. Procurement departments find themselves caught between two conflicting realities. While strategic priorities have shifted firmly towards resilience and risk management, operational infrastructure has failed to keep up.

Joint research from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) and Amazon Business reveals that this gap is leaving organisations exposed. The whitepaper, Balancing Cost and Risk: An Operating Model for Supply Chains, surveyed 425 global professionals and found that 71% of organisations now place balancing cost and risk at the heart of their procurement strategy.

Yet despite this shift in priorities, fewer than half of respondents (45%) believe their procurement functions are actually equipped to handle supply chain disruptions when they arise.

Making resilience operational

It is clear that the most successful businesses are those who are making resilience operational, enabling faster responses to disruption.

In an exclusive webinar hosted by Procurement Magazine and Jabil, Priya Anand, Director of Global Logistics Services at Jabil Procurement and Supply Chain Services, examines the logistics capabilities and operating model decisions that shorten response times and keep service levels and costs stable when conditions shift.

Priya has 25 years of global experience across the supply chain, logistics, maritime and freight forwarding industries, now she works at Jabil, a leading provider of manufacturing and supply chain solutions for various sectors. She is a seasoned leader who delivers value-based solutions and executes complex operations and programmes for large and diverse clients across the world.

The webinar is available to watch on demand.

Inside the response loop

In this webinar, Priya looked at the "response loop" — detect, decide, execute — and where it typically breaks down. She explains the capabilities that support resilience, including multi-carrier and multi-mode flexibility, routing governance, exception handling and escalation paths. Priya also discusses how to measure operational resilience, from lead time variability and OTIF stability to cost-to-serve under disruption.

During the conversation, Priya set out what it takes to build a resilient supply chain, from technology investment to leadership culture. She believes that operational resilience is not simply about bouncing back from disruption. She defines it as a supply chain's ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to and recover from disruption while maintaining continuity in product movement and customer satisfaction.

Logistics is no longer a back-end function, Priya told attendees. It has become a core strategic platform with direct implications for revenue and business continuity. Structured governance, agile decision-making and the breaking down of organisational silos are now business priorities rather than operational details. At Jabil, predictive insights, AI tools and scenario modelling are used to get ahead of disruption rather than simply react to it. Priya pointed to this combination as central to building supply chain models that offer flexibility, visibility and faster decision-making.

Diversification over dependency

Over-reliance on a single operator and thin buffer stocks are common causes of resilience breakdowns when disruption hits, Anand warned. She emphasised the need for diversified strategies and genuine contingency planning — having a real Plan B and Plan C rather than a single fallback.

Building resilience is as much a leadership challenge as a technical one, Priya stated. She called for a shift from reactive firefighting to proactive planning, underpinned by long-term vision, sustained investment in technology and a culture willing to adapt, all supported by clear governance and communication paths.

The webinar is available to watch on demand.