Tech-Driven Resilience: Navigating Supply Chain Disruptions

The term ‘disruption’ has evolved from a sporadic concern into a permanent operational fixture. For UK procurement leaders, the traditional focus on cost reduction is being rapidly eclipsed by the need for survival amidst shifting geopolitical sands.Ivalua’s How Geopolitical Disruption is Reshaping Supply Chains report indicates a significant gap between escalating threats and the readiness of British business to withstand them.

Procurement has moved well beyond just chasing the lowest price. It’s now seen as a frontline function for building sustainable operations, driving product innovation and making sure the business can actually survive a crisis. Yet, despite this deeper understanding, teams around the world are struggling to adapt to demand. Ongoing volatility in the global landscape is creating immense pressure on these teams, making them vulnerable to cracks.

According to a report from Ivalua, 73% of UK businesses expect geopolitical risk to intensify over the coming 12 months. Perhaps more concerning is that 62% of firms admit their supply chains are currently unable to cope with these pressures. As conflicts and trade barriers continue to fragment global trade, procurement technology is moving to the front line of corporate strategy.

The high cost of unpreparedness

The financial consequences of supply chain instability are no longer theoretical. For many organisations, the inability to anticipate or react to global shocks is directly eroding the bottom line. Ivalua’s research reveals that over a quarter of UK firms (26%) report that rising supply costs have placed significant pressure on profitability.

To mitigate these losses, 23% of businesses have already passed increased costs on to their customers. However, price hikes are a finite solution. The real challenge lies in structural agility. While firms have attempted to de-risk by onboarding alternative suppliers (73%) or exploring nearshoring (64%), the overall sense of preparedness remains fragile.

Alex Saric, Smart Procurement Expert at Ivalua, explains the severity of the situation: “Geopolitical risk is no longer an anomaly, it’s a permanent feature of global trade. Our research shows that no region is immune. Geopolitical shocks such as tariffs and mineral price fluctuations can erupt daily, or even hourly. 

“UK businesses are stuck between a rock and a hard place as they either absorb costs or pass them onto customers, pushing them to the brink. Survival depends on making good decisions in critical moments, particularly as our research indicates disruption shows no sign of slowing.”

Eradicating data silos with a single source of truth

A primary obstacle to resilience is the fragmentation of information. Risk data is frequently scattered across disparate ERP platforms, sourcing tools and third-party databases. When a supplier’s compliance status or financial health changes, the signal often gets lost in the noise of duplicated records and inconsistent data.

McKinsey & Company estimates that today's procurement functions use less than 20% of available data to support decision-making. Without a "golden record" – a single, unified source of truth, procurement teams are forced to make critical decisions based on partial or misleading information. 

Karl Poulsen, of Hiscox, describes how they have addressed this challenge: "Ivalua is now our, let's say, one single source of truth for our vendor master management. So everything goes into Ivalua; it is our golden record. 

“We have a complete vendor master inside of there. We have approval workflows, but also some of our financial security audits go through that as well. That creates a one single source to be able to manage, curate and make sure that we're providing the best data going forward."

The geopolitical map: Identifying pressure points

To understand the current state of supply chain disruptions, one must look at the specific stressors weighing on UK procurement. According to Ivalua’s research, the War in Ukraine remains a primary catalyst for instability, negatively impacting confidence for 77% of organisations.

However, the threat landscape is increasingly multi-polar. US tariffs have undermined confidence for 80% of businesses, with many expecting further disruption as new rates ripple through the global economy. Military tensions between China and Taiwan (62%) and the war in Gaza (58%) further complicate the global logistics map. This convergence of crises has forced 18% of UK firms to cut ties with suppliers in specific countries entirely, a clear sign that global disruption is actively fragmenting supply chains.

Agentic AI: From dashboards to orchestration

The emerging use of agentic AI calls for a fundamental evolution of procurement functions. Recent years have seen ongoing inflationary pressure and supply shocks test the limits of legacy models. Procurement leaders are now tasked with predicting both external and internal volatility, tracking disruptions from minor starting points to preempt major events.

Roman Belotserkovskiy, Partner at McKinsey & Company, says: "Across hundreds of conversations with procurement leaders, and based on what we are seeing in live transformations, the pattern is consistent. Leaders are moving beyond dashboards and insights toward agentic systems that deliver not just efficiency, but materially higher effectiveness. 

“As sourcing, negotiations, contract compliance and value preservation are increasingly augmented by AI, the real question becomes: how do we deliberately transition humans to focus on judgment, orchestration and relationships?"

Moving beyond spreadsheets: The power of integration

A significant barrier to managing these disruptions is the reliance on legacy systems that were not built for this level of volatility. 71% of UK businesses now acknowledge that they must invest more in technology to better identify and mitigate geopolitical risks.

By integrating internal and external systems – including CSR, financial risk and compliance data – organisations can automate due diligence. This integrated stack allows for:

• Rapid vendor onboarding: Reducing the time it takes to switch to alternative suppliers when a primary route is blocked.
• Duplicate prevention: Ensuring master data remains clean to avoid payment errors and confused risk signals.
• Regulatory compliance: Meeting stringent reporting requirements, such as DORA, which demand high levels of operational transparency.

Real-time mitigation: The human-agent workflow

The transition toward AI-augmented procurement ensures that insights are not just visible but actionable in real time. AI agents embedded in the workflow do not just report on past disruptions; they monitor signals like shipping variability or cost swings. Alex adds: “In practice, this operates as a human-agent model. AI agents monitor data continuously and surface recommended actions or modify workflows, while procurement teams apply context and make the final decisions. 

“Beyond monitoring, organisations can build their own agent-driven use cases to analyse spend patterns for existing suppliers or model how supplier failures could affect production or revenue. Two things determine whether this works - clean, consistent data across suppliers, contracts and spend and firm governance so agents operate safely.”

By automating routine supplier risk management, an approach 62% of firms already find effective, procurement teams gain the foresight to act before disruption hits. Survival in this new era depends on making a "hard reset" to enable strategic moves, not just tactical fixes, ensuring business infrastructure remains standing against the shifting sands of global trade.