Business resilience and you: taking your enterprise to the next level
If the first years of the 2020s have shown us anything it’s that, well, anything is possible – and it’s not always good. Businesses faced unprecedented hardships throughout the COVID-19 pandemic with everything from technology to operations and reputations up in the air.
As we plough further into the decade, enterprises can expect to face even more unpredictable challenges, from climate change to geopolitical uncertainties, catastrophic weather events to viral outbreaks – so, what’s the solution? The long and the short of it is – business resilience, or the ability to bounce back from unexpected challenges.
What business resilience looks like in 2022
Business resilience is the mark of any successful enterprise, but how do we achieve it? And what does it look like? McKinsey identifies 6 spheres of business resilience (more about them below) including one aspect that’s crucial to future-proofing and growing your business – technological resilience.
Technological resilience
When your business capabilities are optimised through the right technology, you can deliver better outcomes to your stakeholders, increasing business resilience and, ultimately, increasing your shareholder value. In other words, business resilience starts with technology.
What is technological resilience?
Technological resilience is a business’s ability to keep up with changing demands and provide reliable services free from outages, failures and glitches. Technological resilience also encompasses a business’s ability to utilise new technologies to strengthen all other aspects of business resilience and operations including financial, organisational, business model, operational and reputational resilience.
Why is technological resilience so important?
- Future-proofing your business. Technological resilience is the infrastructure through which every aspect of business resilience is made possible. From communication to CRM, finance to security, every element of business resilience relies on technology. Investing in agile, robust infrastructure and scalable technology protects your business from falling behind and allows you to keep up with ever-emerging challenges.
- Safeguarding against reputational risk. Outages, technological failures and data leaks are potentially fatal to your business. Without agile, innovative technology you run the risk of damaging your reputation and turning customers away with clunky or unintuitive tech.
- Increased data visibility allows for better decision making. Investing in intelligent technology allows you to access and interpret data instantly and make better business decisions.
- Meeting operational and organisational needs. Technology also provides invaluable insights and analytics into customer needs, logistics, internal operations and so much more giving visibility over the entire enterprise. Without technological resilience, businesses leave themselves open to system failures, procedural inefficiencies and customer disruptions.
What does technological resilience look like?
- Scalable infrastructure. Investing in innovative, agile technology that can be scaled with your enterprise as it grows.
- Data. Leveraging high-quality data to make smarter business decisions. Data needs to be interpreted, analysed and used to inform decision making – all of which can be done in an instant with the right technology.
- Reliable performance. Investing in secure, reliable technology that delivers a consistent user experience, both for customers and internal team members, is crucial to business resilience. Clunky operating systems and laggy websites, apps or portals can turn users away and undermine the professionalism of your enterprise.
- Putting in place robust disaster recovery measures to ensure uninterrupted services and solid information security will protect you – and your customers – from potential threats and roadblocks.
Technological resilience and Business Spend Optimisation
Technological resilience is the foundation on which all aspects of business resilience are built. Without the infrastructure, data and analytics to track, refine and improve performance you’re starting your business resilience journey on the back foot. Investing in purpose-built contract management software and analytics can benefit every aspect of your business’s resilience. That’s where Business Spend Optimisation comes in!
Read more about Business Spend Optimisation below.
Other aspects of business resilience
While technological resilience safeguards your business against the great unknown and helps you stay agile in an ever-changing world, there are of course other aspects of business resilience which should be taken into account.
Technological resilience will have a flow-on effect and keep you ahead of the curve in the following spheres of business resilience.
Financial resilience
Perhaps the factor most businesses will think of first, financial resilience can be summed up as a business’s ability to balance short and long term financial goals – while weathering unexpected challenges. It can be anything from enabling sufficient capital and availability of assets to account for revenue decreases to making better-informed spend management decisions with Business Spend Optimisation (more on that below) and shoring up your financial position through diversification and liquidity of assets.
Operational resilience
Operational resilience is a business’s ability to provide a consistently high-quality customer experience and output regardless of operational challenges. Whether through flexible delivery methods or scalable supply chains, a business’s operations need to be agile enough to keep up with the ebbs and flows of market demand while weathering the storms of events beyond their control.
Organisational resilience
Organisational resilience is a company’s ability to adapt, grow and flourish in an ever-changing business environment, characterised by team diversity and ongoing training and innovation.
Diversity of opinions, experience and background are crucial to fostering organisational resilience. Fostering diversity and innovation will help strengthen organisational resilience and protect your business from stagnation.
Reputational resilience
Reputational resilience is a company’s ability to align its actions with its values. A reputationally resilient organisation has a strong mission, values and purpose and updates its behaviour in response to stakeholder input and changing societal influences. In the digital age of openness and accountability, every entity has to be prepared for its reputation, values and actions to be held up to intense scrutiny by everyone from customers to shareholders and the general public.
Business-model resilience
Resilient enterprises utilise flexible, adaptable business models which embrace the latest technology and adapt to changing customer demands. What worked ten years ago may not work today – by continually updating your business model and adapting to shifts in customer demand you can stay relevant and competitive regardless of your sector.
Introducing Business Spend Optimisation
Business Spend Optimisation empowers organisations with the data, tools and capabilities to enable better management of each dollar, consequently building business resilience and increasing shareholder value.
To be resilient, businesses need to think beyond financials and be willing to take risks that won’t impact long-term success. Business Spend Optimisation facilitates smart risk-taking behaviours, allowing you to make calculated, data-driven choices that minimise risk and maximise your long-term resilience. By embedding analytics into decision making, you can avoid customer disruptions and remove internal operational roadblocks.
Once your Business Spend Optimisation capability goals reach maturity the following deliverables will be achieved:
● Cost efficiency and savings across the enterprise
● ESG goals are met
● Risk management compliance and deliverables are met
● All compliance matters are met across your supply chain and organisation
● Derive insights and match objectives from automated reports
● Optimum contract performance is achieved
Below are some of the factors which can help you attain business resilience through Business Spend Optimisation.
1. Supplier lifecycle management and Business Spend Optimisation
Suppliers and contractors are the lifeblood of modern enterprises. As we face an ever-expanding range of challenges to supply chains, it’s more vital than ever to gain superior visibility and control over the supplier lifecycle.
An optimised and automated approach to supplier lifecycle management extends far upstream to cover a range of value-adding functions including:
● Spend planning
● Procurement and contract management
● Third-party risk
● Due diligence
● ESG alignment
● Innovation and strategic partnering
2. Optimising your triple bottom line
While most businesses have basic control and visibility over their processes and policies, Business Spend Optimisation works to eliminate risks and maximise the value of every dollar spent through smart technology and data-driven decision making. This impacts your triple bottom-line: people, profit and the planet.
3. ESG issues and accountability
Modern enterprises must hold themselves – and, just as importantly, their suppliers – accountable for ESG issues. Visibility and knowledge of your suppliers and their values can help give your organisation a competitive edge in this regard. It’s not enough to ensure your business has responsible ESG policies and procedures – if your suppliers and contractors don’t adhere to your values it can reflect poorly on your business. Avoid weak links in your supply chain with Business Spend Optimisation by investing in smart supplier relationship management software.
Business Spend Optimisation and you: Next steps
Learn more about Business Spend Optimisation with your free download. Want to know more about how Business Spend Optimisation can be tailored to your business? Get in touch today.
Download the Guidebook to Spend Optimisation
Knowledge is power. Learn the principles behind optimising supplier performance and getting maximum value from your contracts. Click below to download the guidebook written specifically for your industry segment.
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