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Procurement professionals who diversified their supply chains due to the pandemic are now struggling with the realities of managing hundreds of individual relationships, ensuring goods are ethically manufactured, and reaching their sustainability targets.

According to a report by the ONS, 1 in 20 UK businesses diversified their procurement supply chains at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in an effort to keep disruptions to a minimum.

Now, search data shows that procurement professionals are left with a lot of questions about the realities of diversification, particularly when it comes to managing relationships, measuring their environmental impact, and ensuring that products were ethically manufactured.  

Jason Thomas from Banner, says, “It made sense during the pandemic for businesses to diversify their supply chains. The more individual suppliers they could manage, the less likely they would be to suffer major disruption. But the reality of maintaining many different relationships is becoming apparent, and it’s making things like sustainability and ethics much harder to keep track of.

“The problem is supply chains are still unstable, so we aren’t suggesting anyone goes back to having one supplier for each product or service. There is a middle way though. Supply chain partners are a sensible alternative that is the best of both worlds in terms of ease of management and supply chain robustness, sustainability and ethics.”

Searches including the term “sustainable procurement” show professionals are not only searching how to achieve it, but also what it even is. They are also commonly searching for “ethical sourcing practices” and “how to ensure ethical procurement.” But the most common UK searches including the term “supply chain” are “will supply chains get better”, “when will supply chain issues be resolved” and even “supply chain management for dummies”.

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