A procurement-led approach to operational resilience

With disruptions becoming more frequent and harder to predict, operational resilience is shifting from a theoretical risk to an everyday business imperative. Supply chain shocks ripple across regions, labor shortages strain fulfillment, inflation reshapes cost structures, and cyber threats interrupt operations. At the same time, climate events increasingly affect logistics.

For many organizations, these challenges don't arrive one at a time. They overlap, compound, and evolve faster than annual planning cycles.

While resilience is typically discussed in terms of enterprise risk management or IT infrastructure, procurement plays a quieter but equally important role. It influences how quickly your organization can assess alternatives and whether you have visibility into what your teams purchase, from whom, and why. The decisions you make using these insights can either strengthen your ability to respond under pressure or introduce hidden vulnerabilities.

Viewing operational resilience through a procurement lens can help you adapt during disruption. By improving how you manage everyday buying decisions, supplier dependencies, and spending transparency, you can enable more informed purchasing, greater process flexibility, and faster decision-making.

What is operational resilience?

Operational resilience is your organization’s ability to continue delivering critical operations during disruption and to adapt when conditions change. It’s the capacity to prevent, respond to, recover from, and learn from operational disruptions, regardless of their source.

Unlike traditional risk management, operational resilience doesn't assume you can predict or avoid all potential risks. Instead, it focuses on maintaining outcomes—such as customer service, safety, or regulatory obligations—even when systems, suppliers, or processes are under stress.

Operational resilience vs. business continuity and disaster recovery

Operational resilience is often confused with business continuity planning and disaster recovery, but each refers to different capabilities:

• Business continuity focuses on predefined plans to keep operations running during specific scenarios.

• Disaster recovery is often narrower, concentrating on restoring information security systems after major incidents, such as cyberattacks.

• Operational resilience is broader and more dynamic. It includes continuity and recovery plans but also emphasizes ongoing adaptability, decision-making under uncertainty, and learning over time.
  
  

For procurement leaders, this distinction matters. Resilience isn’t just about having a backup supplier on paper—it’s about whether your buying processes, policies, and data give you the ability to act effectively when circumstances shift.

Procurement's role in operational resilience

According to the latest BCI Supply Chain Resilience Report, nearly 80% of organizations experienced supply chain disruptions over a one-year span, with some facing up to 10 disruptions. Of those disruptions, more than 43% were caused by third-party failures, with cyber incidents ranked as the second leading cause.

Because procurement sits at the intersection of suppliers, spend, and internal demand, it gives you a unique vantage point into where your organization depends on external parties, how flexible those dependencies are, and how quickly buying behavior can adapt under pressure. This perspective allows procurement to play a critical role in third-party risk management and incident response.

Supplier continuity and visibility into critical spend

Supplier availability directly affects your organization’s ability to operate. When critical categories rely on a small number of suppliers, disruptive events can quickly turn into operational downtime.

While procurement can’t eliminate risk, it can help you make better purchasing choices. According to McKinsey’s Global Supply Chain Leader Survey, companies that implemented strategic resilience projects in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are now seeing results: 73% report progress on dual-sourcing strategies, and 60% are working to regionalize their supply chains.

Understanding where sole sourcing exists, where supplier concentration is high, and where alternatives are limited can help you assess exposure and prioritize attention—but that evaluation becomes more difficult when buying happens outside established channels. Decentralized buying and unmanaged tail spend reduce visibility and introduce additional resilience gaps, making it harder to spot emerging risks, identify supplier dependencies, or coordinate responses during disruption.

This visibility is foundational to moving beyond reactive responses. Before you can use predictive analytics or advanced risk modeling, you need a clear view of what your teams buy, who they buy it from, and how those purchases support critical business operations.

Procurement’s role during disruption, not just planning cycles

Resilience often comes up during planning cycles, but real-world disruption is what puts it to the test. When conditions change, either due to supply chain constraints, price volatility, or sudden demand shifts, procurement helps determine how quickly your organization can respond.

Clear buying channels, pre-approved suppliers, and accessible data support faster decision-making. Without these things, teams may resort to ad hoc purchasing that solves immediate problems but creates longer-term risk exposure.

Procurement’s contribution centers on enablement. By providing options, context, and guardrails, it can help your organization act with speed and confidence when it matters most.

Data-driven change and strengthening supplier relationships

Procurement leaders are increasingly focusing on two interconnected priorities: 

1. Using data to drive smarter decisions

    

2. Strengthening supplier relationships beyond transactional interactions

    

Data helps identify patterns, anomalies, and shifts in buying behavior that may signal emerging risks or inefficiencies. Strong supplier relationships, in turn, can support flexibility during constrained conditions, whether through access to alternative products, adjusted lead times, or collaborative problem-solving.

When these two priorities work together, they reinforce operational resilience. Amazon Business supports this unified approach with data-driven features like Amazon Business Analytics, as well as Business Prime features such as Spend Visibility and Spend Anomaly Monitoring, helping you ground internal and supplier conversations in data without claiming to predict or prevent disruption outright.

4 pillars of operational resilience

Operational resilience can feel abstract, but most frameworks converge on a small set of foundational components. Understanding these four pillars clarifies what makes resilience work in practice.

1. Identify critical operations and dependencies

Resilience efforts typically begin by identifying which operations are truly critical and what they depend on. This includes suppliers, spend categories, logistics partners, internal processes, and enabling systems.

For procurement, this means understanding which categories support essential outcomes and how operational incidents in those areas could affect the organization.

2. Manage third-party service and supplier risk

Third parties are a major source of operational dependency. Managing supplier risk at a high level involves awareness of concentration, geographic exposure, and dependency—not exhaustive scoring or compliance exercises. The goal is not to eliminate risk but to make it visible and manageable.

3. Build adaptability into processes and policies

Rigid processes can slow response during disruption. Adaptable policies—such as alternate buying paths or conditional approvals—allow you to adjust without abandoning governance.

Adaptability is less about constant change and more about having flexibility when it matters.

4. Establish clear ownership and decision-making accountability

Operational resilience depends on clear ownership across procurement, operations, finance, and IT. No single function owns resilience outright.

Procurement supports resilience by enabling informed decisions through insight, options, and structure, while accountability remains shared across the organization.

How to improve operational resilience

Improving operational resilience doesn’t require a new operating model. For procurement leaders, progress often comes from clarifying what matters most, reducing friction in everyday buying, and strengthening visibility where decisions are already being made. The following steps can help you take action in increments.

Step 1: Map critical spend categories and suppliers

Pinpoint which spend categories and suppliers support critical operations. The objective is understanding exposure, not eliminating suppliers. This mapping creates a baseline for prioritization and discussion.

Step 2: Reduce over-reliance on manual or ad hoc buying

Identify where teams rely on manual or ad hoc buying and put more consistent processes in place. Unmanaged buying can introduce delays, inconsistency, and blind spots, which weaken operational resilience over time. Standardizing purchasing practices improves visibility, strengthens control, and helps your organization respond more predictably during disruption.

Step 3: Establish clearer buying policies for disruption scenarios

Define and communicate the policies that guide purchasing during disruptions. Make sure your teams understand approval paths, alternative options, and escalation processes so they can act decisively when conditions change. Clear policies support speed and flexibility while keeping decision-making aligned with organizational priorities.

Step 4: Improve visibility into purchasing patterns over time

Track and review spending trends and anomalies to identify potential risks or inefficiencies. This insight can help you spot emerging issues, adjust priorities, and make more informed purchasing decisions without relying on complex analytics. 

Step 5: Include procurement in business risk assessments

Integrate procurement perspectives into risk assessments to identify and prioritize potential disruptions to people, business services, financial systems, or operations. Operational resilience stress testing and realistic simulations can help determine risk appetite, impact tolerances, and points of failure, while scenario testing helps gauge cybersecurity and cyber resilience within procurement-related systems. Use these insights to inform a broader resilience framework that guides adaptation and recovery from disruptions, including system outages.

Step 6: Revisit and refine regularly as conditions change

Schedule regular reviews of policies, suppliers, and tools, updating them based on new risks, operational changes, or supplier performance to maintain alignment with current realities. Continuous improvement strengthens adaptability and builds operational resilience over time.

Operational resilience: Common myths

As operational resilience gains attention, skepticism is natural. Here are a few common myths regarding resilience and the reality behind them.

Myth: Operational resilience is a compliance exercise

While regulators have driven much of the conversation, resilience is fundamentally a business capability. Organizations that can adapt quickly are better positioned to serve customers, manage costs, and protect their reputation.

Myth: Resilience means building redundancy

Resilience doesn't require duplicating every supplier or process. Thoughtful flexibility and visibility often deliver greater benefits at a lower cost than blanket redundancy.

Myth: Procurement can solve resilience alone

Procurement plays an enabling role, but resilience depends on cross-functional collaboration. Credibility comes from recognizing shared ownership and working closely with operations, finance, and IT.

Procurement tools for resilience

Digital procurement tools can support operational resilience by bringing consistency, visibility, and control to everyday buying. When used thoughtfully, they become part of a broader resilience ecosystem.

Amazon Business supports operational resilience by enabling informed and adaptable purchasing practices. Some features that can help you create clearer buying paths and streamline your purchasing data include:

• Purposeful integrations with more than 300 e-procurement, expense management, idP, and e-sourcing systems to help consolidate data and visibility 

• Multi-user controls and approval workflows that support governance and flexibility

• Spend Visibility (a Business Prime exclusive feature) that helps surface spending patterns and anomalies over time

   

Make operational resilience a priority

Operational resilience is built through everyday decisions, not one-time initiatives. Procurement contributes by enabling visibility into spend, adaptability in buying processes, and informed decision-making when conditions change.

As disruption becomes more frequent and interconnected, procurement’s role in resilience will only grow. By focusing on foundational practices rather than perfection, you can strengthen your ability to adapt and continue operating under pressure.

Explore how smarter purchasing practices can support your operational resilience. Contact our sales team to learn more.