As economic uncertainty becomes a defining feature of the global business environment, resilience is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. Finance leaders are being asked to not only manage risk, but also to lead the strategic response. Drawing on the Business Resilience Toolkit, this article explores three levers for action: supply chain management, product adaptation, and customer diversification.
Supply chain resilience
The past five years have exposed the fragility of global supply chains. From Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic to ongoing tariff shocks and geopolitical tensions, businesses have learned that their supply chains can be affected in various ways, even concurrently. But that does not mean businesses need to be bystanders in this. They can take proactive steps to build resilience, capacity, and capability in their supply chains.
This proactive approach requires finance to take the lead. It involves not only assessing cost and risk but also shaping strategic decisions. The toolkit outlines a multi-layered approach that starts with reviewing, testing, and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses in your supply chains. Understanding where the risk and opportunities are in your supply chain is key.
Some of the key actions that you can take to review your supply chain are:
Scenario planning, horizon scanning, and stress-testing. These actions can help you understand your supply chain fully and determine where the vulnerabilities and opportunities are — in case you need to move from one supplier to another. They can also help you map out mitigations in response to supply chain shocks.
When reviewing your supply chains using these tools, you should ask some key questions:
- Can you clearly identify your supply chain problems during the last five years, particularly in relation to tariff changes, and supply chain and economic shocks?
- How can you rethink your supply chains to improve resilience in the face of ongoing tariff uncertainties and global trade tensions?
- Will wider communication and purposeful analysis across the business enable stronger reliability and better-optimised supply chains?
- Should just-in-time practices be diluted? Should you consider nearshoring or onshoring, especially considering trade wars and disruption? Within your portfolio and risk management perspectives, what elements of your supply chain could be onshored to mitigate tariff risks?
- What are the main supply chain issues in the current environment, including those caused by tariffs?
- What initial solutions have you implemented to address tariff impacts, and how were they developed?
- How are you leveraging technology to strengthen supply chain resilience?
- What are the potential opportunities for future trade deals that could reduce tariff pressures on your supply chains?
- How are you using scenario modelling and AI to test cost-effective supply chain adjustments in response to tariff changes?
- What relationships do you have with other suppliers? What relationships do you need to build?
Diversify the supply chain. The questions listed above may lead you to identify nearshoring and/or onshoring as a potential solution to help build resilience in your supply chain.
When considering these options to diversify your supply chain, you should use the tools above to test whether they would be right for your business. You might also consider whether a combination of your current suppliers with some new nearshore or onshore suppliers will provide the right level of resilience for your business.
In conducting these exercises, here are some questions you may wish to consider in the context of the current economic environment:
- What solutions have you created in the past few years and months that could become permanent?
- Are onshoring or nearshoring viable options for your company?
- What does onshoring and/or nearshoring look like in your business?
- Can you develop easy onshoring wins to address key vulnerabilities exposed by recent economic disruptions?
- Define what the nature of home capacity could look like in terms of supply chain — chain length, processes, locations, and stretch.
- Are there home capacity options — firms that can meet the supply demand — to engage with locally, regionally, or nationally?
- Research and source the home capacity market to understand the supply chains of potential new suppliers. Do new suppliers have very extended supply chains themselves, effectively restoring your vulnerabilities?
- Can you pilot a few onshoring and/or nearshoring operations and, if successful, build these up?
- Can your company be the catalyst for a regional onshoring operation that provides just-in-time delivery?
- Is a blended approach, mixing onshore, nearshore, and offshore options, viable?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of onshoring 20%, 40%, 60%, or 100%?
Think long term. When reviewing your supply chain, you should not just think about the present-day challenges, but also longer-term ones. This can help ensure that any actions you take on your supply chain are sustainable and will last. Some key questions you should ask are:
- Are you reviewing your supply chain more frequently to better adapt to economic uncertainties and potential disruptions?
- Are you regularly stress-testing supplier relationships to uncover vulnerabilities and find joint solutions?
- If you develop an onshoring strategy, are there options for business partnerships and local skills strategies to grow? Can they be leveraged through local workforce initiatives?
- Over the medium and longer term, can you create more sustainable supply chains that enhance stakeholder and customer trust?
Collaborate with suppliers. This is vital and should be running throughout the actions that you take on your supply chain. You need to think of your supply chain as a partnership and not just procurement.
The toolkit contains a supply chain checklist that helps ensure finance teams have covered all the key points and actions to help build resilience in their supply chain.
Product adaptation
When speaking to finance professionals working in multiple sectors across the globe, many described how they are using product adaptation to help mitigate challenges facing their businesses and thrive in times of uncertainty.
What you can do around product depends on what your business does, but here are some of the key areas where finance teams are supporting their businesses on product adaptation:
Design. Finance teams can drive value in product design by applying target costing to align product development with market-driven cost thresholds, ensuring profitability from the outset. They should also embed lifecycle costing to account for total cost of ownership and support lean production by identifying cost-saving opportunities across the value chain.
Diversification. Beyond diversifying your supply chain, as covered above, also consider whether your products could be adapted to changing customer needs or to provide more to your customers. Also consider the marketing of your products and how that could support showing your customers why they are still needed.
Substitution. You should also consider if the materials that make your product could be substituted or changed to resolve either cost pressures or supply chain issues. When sourcing new materials for substitution, collaboration with your supply chain is key.
Customer diversification
Don’t just think about diversification in terms of your supply chains and your products. Consider your customers, too. Could your customer base change due to economic shocks and uncertainty? Could the crises your business is facing present an opportunity to find new customers?
When considering these things, finance is key for the business to find the right data and insights to help shape decisions. Finance can help ensure that data on new markets, opportunities, and customers is understood by the wider business before making decisions around broadening or changing your customer base.
The Business Resilience Toolkit makes one thing clear: Finance is a strategic critical leader. By leading on supply chain strategy, product innovation, and customer diversification, finance professionals can help their organisations not only survive uncertainty but also thrive and emerge stronger than before.
Resilience is not a fixed state — it’s a capability. And with the right tools, finance can build it. The Business Resilience Toolkit helps finance to take those steps.
— Ross Archer is director–Public Policy at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Oliver Rowe at Oliver.Rowe@aicpa-cima.com.
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Articles
“Tools and Actions to Prepare for Tariff Change Impacts”, FM magazine, 6 June 2025
“How Finance Leaders Are Countering Tariff Volatility”, FM magazine, 4 June 2025
“7 Actions for Finance in Response to Trade Shocks”, FM magazine, 1 May 2025
