Beyond Supplier Risk Management: How Procurement Can Take a Leadership Role in Enterprise Risk Management (Part 2) — Aligning Enterprise Risk to Supply Risk

In Part 1 of this series, we described the process that most progressive procurement organizations use to relate enterprise risk to supply risk. Throughout such transformations, a single theme pervades: alignment. The premise here is that while value chains are, in fact, a chain of value that flows across multiple stakeholders, the “signal” often gets lost as the components of that value go across organizational and functional boundaries. We’ve written before about this concept of “supply performance management” (i.e., where the definition of supply and the supply scorecard gets translated from the customer-facing value chain all the way down to a supplier/contract level) in terms of measuring and managing supply value, but this same concept also inherently applies to risk management.

Risk management is about protecting those value streams, and therefore the commensurate investment in risk mitigation should align with the value streams themselves. Unfortunately, they often don’t, because stakeholders are not typically measured on risk management explicitly (although they can be measured on it implicitly).

Procurement itself faces this problem. Based on our research, only 8% of procurement organizations are formally measured on supply risk reduction. Instead, they’re measured on overt reward (vis a vis savings) but not on protecting those improved supply outcomes. So, if procurement wants to protect supply outcomes, it will need help and resources from the natural risk owners (i.e., those who are measured on the business outcomes affected by those risks) — and that help will not come unless there is visibility, commitment and action. As such, in this installment of this series, we’ll discuss two critical frameworks that organizations can use to gain alignment.