Supplier Risk and Market Intelligence: Proactive Risk Management Through Data

The most obvious use case for market intelligence in procurement is cost saving. With greater insight into global market and category trends comes the ability to negotiate better prices and contract terms, optimize sourcing strategies, and ensure stable and consistent supply of essential goods and services at an agreeable cost.

But that’s far from its only purpose. Increasingly, market intelligence has an important role to play in both procurement risk management, and the mitigation of supplier risk. Here, market insights help procurement teams sense, understand, and act on market and supplier-level risks that could jeopardize the availability of essential goods, cause regional price spikes, or disrupt complex global supply chains.

In the past, cost savings were the greatest form of value that the procurement function could deliver to the wider business. The business laid out its strategy and what resources it would need to execute it, then procurement stepped in to source required goods at a cost which created strong margins, driving profitability and growth.

But in recent years, conditions have shifted significantly. As the frequency and severity of major disruptive events like pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, and catastrophic weather events have increased, the characteristics of the most successful procurement teams have evolved. Today’s top performers aren’t just the best negotiators and planners — they’re the most agile and adaptive teams, and the ones capable of responding fastest when disruption strikes.

With the pace of change so high, it isn’t enough to simply keep up with disruption. Procurement teams must do everything they can to get ahead of global shifts, and that’s where market intelligence becomes so valuable.

When it’s timely, reliable, and complete, market and supplier data grants procurement teams visibility of what’s coming next. They can begin to anticipate price and production changes, spot at-risk suppliers, and make changes to their supply strategies before the impacts of disruption ramp up. That’s the key to enabling truly proactive procurement operations.

Any form of data that helps you detect developing trends at a global or local level has the potential to help you mitigate procurement risk. However, there are three main categories of intelligence that leading procurement teams use to support proactive risk management.

• Supplier risk analytics help procurement decision-makers surface otherwise undetectable risks across their supplier portfolio. Financial performance, official disclosures, DDQ responses and many more data points are collated to build a complete picture of supplier risk, showing procurement teams which of their suppliers they can truly depend on, and which require engagement to remediate underlying issues that could impact their ability to deliver.

• Category intelligence gives procurement teams a clear view of their key category markets, starting with global trends and going right down into local developments and granular shifts. This view helps decision-makers spot when prices might rise or supply could become constrained in specific geographies. In turn, that insight can help teams proactively mitigate risk by evolving their supply strategy for that category to sidestep disruption.

• Market-level insight provides a robust overview of global economic trends and supply chain conditions. This intelligence is particularly useful for scenario modelling, where procurement teams can simulate how emerging events may play out, and see the downstream impact of each scenario on prices and resource availability. Using that insight they can prepare response plans proactively and apply the right strategy instantly as the real impacts of market shifts and disruption become clear.

The simplest way to ensure that the market intelligence you source also supports supplier and third-party risk mitigation in intuitive and convenient ways is to select a market intelligence partner that’s highly risk aware.

WNS Procurement understands the strategic value of market intelligence and delivers contextualized insights that enable teams to evolve their approach to third-party risk management, while optimizing their procurement spend.

We understand that procurement’s ability to anticipate, sense, and respond to emerging market and supplier-level risks is its greatest strategic asset today, and that’s reflected in how we deliver market intelligence.

We don’t just provide data and analytics. We contextualize insight and directly translate it into strategic remediation suggestions and plans. So, as soon as you spot a problem, your teams can also clearly see multiple potential solutions and make informed decisions about which one is right for your organization.

A procurement team’s ability to use market intelligence to mitigate risk ultimately rests on the accessibility and visibility of that insight. And that is defined at the platform level.

A strong supply risk management platform powered by market intelligence will have a few key capabilities to support procurement decision-makers:

• Proactive, role-based alerts: Alerts flag developing trends pulled from market intelligence early and put them in front of the right people so they can act quickly.

• 360-degree intelligence: All forms of market and supplier intelligence are brought together and used to add vital context to one another, creating a single clear view of risk that procurement teams can depend on.

• AI-augmented recommendations: Insights need to be converted into actions quickly, so the best platforms will responsibly apply AI to generate recommended next best actions to support rapid and proactive risk response.

• Natural language querying: With so many different forms of intelligence and risk vectors to consider, strong platforms will also use AI to enable procurement teams to ask clear questions related to risk exposure in natural language.

• Expert human support: Every organization has unique procurement intelligence demands and will occasionally require bespoke research and support. Good platforms will build this in and make it easy to access.

When market intelligence is contextualized and delivered in the right way, it’s much more than just a tool for optimizing spend and minimizing costs. It becomes an incredibly valuable risk management and mitigation asset, enabling procurement teams to get ahead of the continuous disruption they face today and help their organizations become extremely resilient and adaptive.

WNS Procurement blends decades of experience delivering reliable, complete, and timely market intelligence with deep procurement and supply chain risk expertise to help teams like yours convert insight into actions that mitigate risk while driving business value.

To learn more about our market intelligence and third-party risk management solutions, and see how the two integrate to deliver 360-degree procurement intelligence, talk to us today.