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Supply chain risk management: Tariffs, disruptions and more
Supply chain risks are growing. A multitude of complex, interconnected risk factors are driving volatility and putting new pressure on manufacturing CEOs and COOs to adapt in response. Implementing a practical supply chain risk management strategy can help. Keep reading to learn what that looks like and how to get started. What are the top supply chain risks? Supply chain risks are largely shaped by government policy, geopolitical events and international conflict. Key risks include tariffs, the wars in Iran and Ukraine, energy shortages and USMCA ambiguity, as well as raw material pricing volatility — all of which are deeply interrelated. Here are the major supply chain risks explained in more detail: Tariffs: The Trump administration’s tariff policies have added new costs to U.S. imports (current tariff rates add 10-50% to the price of imported goods), with the volatility of the tariffs themselves also presenting a challenge. International conflicts: The Iran war has pushed oil and gas prices up significantly, while the war in Ukraine has affected prices for other commodities like wheat and cooking oil (while also resulting in current and possibly future sanctions on Russian gas and oil). Rising energy demand: The wars are affecting supply, but a growing U.S. demand for energy that’s driven largely by data centers has also pushed energy prices higher. Volatile raw materials pricing: Raw materials prices have continued to climb higher, including crucial materials like metals and resin, with supply chains for molds and dies also heavily disrupted. USMCA ambiguity: We don’t know whether the USMCA negotiations will successfully result in a new iteration of the trade agreement, creating additional uncertainty for manufacturers, especially those with cross-border operations. Driver shortage: New U.S. policies have limited the labor pool in the trucking industry, making it harder to move goods. Ending the wars with Iran and Ukraine may be a tall order for the average manufacturing business to take on. But that doesn’t mean you’re helpless here either. How do you implement a supply chain risk management strategy? Implementing a cohesive supply chain risk management strategy can help your manufacturing business weather the storm of today’s supply chain risks. The key here is to stop worrying about what you can’t control and focus on what you can do: 1. Map your supply chain Mapping your supply chain will help you better understand your specific risks so you can take steps to mitigate them. To do this, identify each of your vendors, evaluate all your different supply chain inputs throughout the entire process from quote to cash, consider how long you’re holding raw materials and finished goods, and note when payments are made. 2. Identify alternative vendors Based on your supply chain mapping, explore whether alternative vendors or geographies could lower costs or reduce volatility. For example, switching vendors to a lower-tariff country could help, as could finding a U.S.-based vendor willing to absorb certain tariff costs on its end. 3. Monitor supply chain pricing Designate someone on your team to monitor supply chain pricing and tariff updates. This can help your business react more quickly to changes , which is especially important in today’s volatile environment. 4. Rework costing and quoting Your expenses have changed, and your costing and quoting needs to reflect that. Rework it all to take today’s supply chain environment into account and price in tariff costs and volatility. 5. Find operational efficiencies Finding operational efficiencies and getting creative with AI can help you offset higher supply chain costs. Automation can be a game-changer here , especially if you use tax incentives like bonus depreciation and qualified production property to lower the barriers to entry. 6. Do scenario planning Planning for supply chain risks helps you better prepare to meet them. Game out different scenarios like tariff hikes or oil price spikes to evaluate what that could mean for your business and how you should respond. 7. Reevaluate customer and vendor contracts As you negotiate new customer and vendor contracts, take rising costs and volatility into account. Prioritize flexibility here: You don’t want to get locked into a long-term contract only to watch your costs spiral due to factors that are out of your hands. Shrinking margins mean the time to act is now In Wipfli’s recent survey of 456 manufacturing executives, those leaders reported that profitability is declining across the board . Today’s volatility has contributed significantly to that margin pressure, which means that acting to mitigate supply chain risks can help relieve it. The time to act is now. Businesses that adapt to today’s challenges will not just get through them but become more flexible and efficient in doing so. However, those who wait too long will only fall further behind the eight-ball — until it may be hard to catch up. Read more 9 top tariff mitigation strategies for manufacturing CFOs AI disruption is coming for manufacturing. How should your firm adapt? R&D tax credits can lower your tax bill. Do you qualify?
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Manufacturing risk management: Key threats and action steps
The manufacturing industry is in the midst of a volatile period. Manufacturers must overcome risks like tariffs, supply chain disruptions, international macroeconomic pressures from the wars in Iran and Ukraine, AI growing pains and more — all while protecting profitability. Implementing an effective risk management strategy can help your manufacturing business navigate today’s risks. Keep reading to learn more, plus how to assess and mitigate your own top risks. Why risk management matters for manufacturers Manufacturing businesses are currently operating in a high-VUCA environment. The acronym, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, describes many of the key pressures manufacturing CFOs and COOs face as they try to maintain smooth operations and combat shrinking margins. Risk management is a way to bring a little stability to that high-VUCA environment. There’s so much you can’t control — tariffs, international trade, wars, government policies — but by focusing on what you can do within your own four walls, you can still manage your risks enough to protect your value and operating income. This often starts with a mindset shift. If you’re willing to let go of your old ways of doing business and embrace changes like new technology or revamped processes, you’ll have taken a big first step towards making your business stronger and more adaptable. What are the major risks facing manufacturers? Manufacturers today face risks like supply chain concentration, workforce shortages and cybersecurity threats. Those risks are compounded by big-picture, geopolitical issues like tariffs and international conflicts, as well as the ongoing rise of AI. Top risks for manufacturers include: Tariff risks: Most U.S. imports are now tariffed at between 10-50% , raising materials costs for many manufacturers while also putting additional cost pressures on consumers. Geopolitical risks: The wars in Iran and Ukraine have strained supply chains and caused price spikes for oil and other essential commodities. Workforce risks: Manufacturing’s perennial labor problem hasn’t gotten any easier, with both worker shortages and high labor costs continuing to pressure businesses. Supply chain risks: Many manufacturers still put too many eggs in one basket, relying on overly concentrated supply chains with respect to both vendors and customers. AI risks: While AI can deliver significant benefits to manufacturers , the technology comes with major risks too , especially in areas like data privacy and shadow AI . Cybersecurity risks: Cybersecurity has increasingly gone from just an IT concern to a significant financial risk , as ransomware attacks or data breaches can lead to financial, operational and reputational harm. Shrinking margins: Rising costs on many fronts are cutting into margins, making it harder for manufacturers to get or stay profitable. Production risks: Depending on industry or process type, manufacturers also face production-specific risks around issues like safety and wasted open capacity. How to assess manufacturing risk Your manufacturing business may deal with many of the industrywide risks covered in this article, but it could also face others more specific to your region or niche within the industry. Conducting a manufacturing risk assessment can help you understand your unique risk environment and develop a strategy to mitigate it. Here’s a practical risk assessment framework for manufacturers (a risk advisory firm can help you work through it): 1. Identify and document risks Identify the risk areas and individual risks that could affect your business. This will likely include industrywide risks like tariffs or cybersecurity. Also consider factors more specific to your business, like a mission-critical employee who’s due to retire or production risks like food or chemical safety. 2. Assess the likelihood and impact of each risk Once you have a list of risks, assess each risk based on likelihood and impact. You can rate each of these factors using a scale of low, medium or high. 3. Prioritize risk based on likelihood and impact Prioritize your risks based on likelihood and impact, as well as your essential business objectives. For example, if supply chain disruptions are both high-likelihood and high-impact, that’s a risk you’ll want to tackle right away, while a low-likelihood, medium-impact risk will likely be much lower on your priorities list. Your C-suite should also discuss risk tolerance. 4. Identify existing controls and gaps Assess the controls, policies and procedures you already have in place to mitigate your high-priority risks. This will also help you identify control gaps that need to be filled, like a lack of AI governance or an ineffective system for tracking tariff costs. 5. Develop risk mitigation strategies Develop a risk management roadmap to tackle your top priority risks. This will typically include establishing new controls or policies to manage risk, as well as training, scenario planning and strategic steps like technology upgrades or inventory management changes. 6. Assign risk owners and accountability To ensure your risk management roadmap actually gets implemented, assign owners to each action step. Creating a system of accountability, like regular reporting at the C-suite or board level, can also help drive follow-through. 7. Monitor and assess risk regularly As you implement your risk management roadmap, continue to regularly monitor your risk environment and periodically reassess. Risks are constantly evolving, so your risk management strategy needs to be, too. How can manufacturers mitigate business risks? Implementing a risk management strategy can help manufacturing CFOs and COOs mitigate their top business risks. Depending on the results of your risk assessment, you may wish to consider strategies like: Work with a risk management advisor An advisory firm that works with manufacturers to manage risk and improve performance can help your business navigate today’s high-VUCA environment. Look to an advisor to conduct your risk assessment and help you implement internal controls, operational changes and strategic shifts to manage your risks. Strengthen supply chain resilience Diversify your supply chain to mitigate tariff and disruption risks. Start by mapping your supply chain and identifying possible alternatives for both sourcing and customers. You may also want to do a reshoring or nearshoring evaluation to determine if either could make sense for your business. Improve operational processes and controls Running your business more efficiently can help protect your margins from surging costs . One idea: Implement production monitoring to get a clearer sense of how your production is performing on a day-to-day basis (you’ll get a dashboard showing red or green status for your machines) so you can establish a baseline to improve on. You can also use AI to make predictive maintenance recommendations to reduce your risk of machine downtime. Strengthen your analytics The more data you have, the better you understand how your business is performing. This applies to not just production line performance but also areas like costs, pricing, inventory and organizational performance — all of which can help you identify inefficiencies and understand how what happens in your plant impacts profitability. Implement strong cybersecurity and AI controls You need effective controls for cybersecurity , data protection and AI. This typically includes establishing technology governance , implementing ongoing cybersecurity training and taking steps to make your business more cyber resilient . Improve financial forecasting and scenario planning CFOs should take advantage of AI’s analytical capabilities to do extensive financial forecasting and evaluate the impact of various scenarios. Forecasting and scenario planning can help you to both understand potential risk areas and decide which to prioritize in your risk roadmap. Regularly reassess risks and update controls and strategies Don’t assume today’s risks are the same as tomorrows. Make risk management an ongoing, living practice that includes periodic reassessments and updates to your controls and strategies. Stop putting off succession planning Succession planning isn’t just about who will own the company 10 years from now. Engaging in a thoughtful succession planning process makes your whole business more stable by ensuring continuity of knowledge after a long-time employee retires, passing sales relationships from one generation to the next and giving employees a path to move up in the business. Don’t ignore valuable tax opportunities Manufacturers can often offset margin pressures using tax incentives. Depending on the circumstances, these may include R&D tax credits , bonus depreciation or qualified production property , state-level incentives and even sunsetting energy efficiency deductions like 179D that could still apply to plant upgrades you’ve already made. Read More Can the qualified production property rule help your manufacturing firm reduce tax payments? Cybersecurity in manufacturing: Strategies to mitigate risk Manufacturing trends: What 456 leaders say about the industry today.
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How financial institutions can compete in today’s economy
The financial services business climate is faster and more complex than ever. Today, traditional community financial institutions must compete for customers with not just each other, but fintech companies and new digital payment options, all while breaking through the noise of countless other demands on customers’ attention. How should an institution’s CEO adjust its growth strategy to succeed in this environment? Keep reading to find out, plus why doing so also requires a new approach to managing risk. How should community financial institutions adapt to compete in today’s attention economy? Winning customers’ attention, in today’s attention-starved environment, doesn’t mean creating a flashy ad campaign. Instead, it’s about meeting your customers (and potential customers) where they are by blending new technology, such as online account opening, with timeless community banking fundamentals. It’s this combination that helps your institution stand out from the plethora of large national banks, fintech companies and other digital payment alternatives competing for your customers’ business. Here are key actions CEOs can push to help drive growth and customer retention: 1. Win on customer experience Customer experience (CX) is what a customer experiences during their every interaction with your financial institution, including marketing, account opening, customer service and branch visits. CX is the single biggest strategic asset for community and regional financial institutions, because smaller institutions are better positioned than big banks and fintechs to build long-term, human relationships with customers that lead to organic growth. 2. Understand your customers better than ever To deliver that superior customer experience, you also have to understand what your customers want and need. To do this, do a deep dive into your customer data: Develop data-based personas, map your customer journeys, explore how you can provide more automated personalization and offer proactive services rather than waiting for your customers to come to you. 3. Use AI when it makes sense AI can help you analyze your data to learn about your customers more deeply. But you can also create customer-facing AI tools that provide instant answers to questions and personalized recommendations for products or services that fit a particular customer’s specific needs. Leaning into AI also helps give your employees more time to focus on the human aspects of their job, like customer relationships or complex problem-solving. However, you can’t just throw AI on top of ineffective processes or bad data and expect it to perform miracles — your foundation has to be solid before you add in AI . 4. Reduce friction wherever you can Friction kills CX. Nobody wants to wait for a slow app to load, navigate a clunky UI or struggle to set up a password for their new bank account. Reduce friction in your customer service experience wherever you can, as this is often an area where newer fintech companies will shine. Conducting a friction audit can help you accomplish this goal. During the audit, you’ll identify specific friction points within your customer experience and prioritize which ones to solve based on impact. 5. Offer a consistent omnichannel experience Whether a customer is stopping in the branch, opening a new account online, or calling your contact center to apply for a loan, they should feel like they are having a consistent, cohesive experience. This omnichannel approach is both a powerful branding exercise and an implicit promise that you will always come through for your customers. 6. Measure whether you’re delivering for your customers How quickly and smoothly can you deliver what your customers want? This is the essential metric you need to track, measure and seek to improve on, and someone in your C-suite should own it. 7. Earn (and keep) customer trust By taking the action steps above, you’ll also start earning meaningful customer trust. This is a long-term differentiator for community and regional financial institutions: The sense you’re looking out for your customers in a way that a fintech or a Wells Fargo never could. A frictionless omni-channel experience is also especially effective at building trust. While this might surprise you, how you manage risk and compliance also affects customer trust. And right now, the moment is ripe to change your approach to one that fits better with today’s business climate. Financial institutions should pivot to a risk-based approach to compliance and risk management Even as technology, markets and customer expectations are evolving faster than ever, regulatory agencies have pulled back on some of their traditional compliance oversight responsibilities . As a result, financial institutions have new flexibility to reallocate their compliance and risk management budgets from a compliance-based approach to a risk-based approach. Rather than approaching compliance as simply a box-checking exercise, a risk-based approach is more adaptive and better suited to navigating today’s risks and business realities. This strategy seeks to: Broadly assess your risks and compliance challenges. Identify risks as high, medium or low based on potential impact to your institution or customers. Prioritize mitigating risks that are higher impact so that you allocate your resources more effectively. Implement new or more effective controls to mitigate higher impact risks. Conduct ongoing monitoring and reassessment to ensure that your risk-management and compliance efforts continue to focus on where they’ll do the most good. A risk-based approach protects both your institution and your customer experience Risks are evolving as fast as the rest of the business environment is. By following a risk-based approach, your institution is able to constantly adapt as new risks emerge rather than getting locked into a compliance checklist that may no longer adequately reflect the latest risks in areas like cybersecurity or AI. Taking a risk-based approach is also a powerful tool to help protect your reputation with customers. Essentially, a risk-based approach goes hand in hand with your growth efforts by mitigating your risk of incidents that could hurt your customer experience (or draw attention to your institution for the wrong reasons rather than the right ones). Read more A short guide to vCISOs for financial institutions How should financial institutions respond to the federal compliance pullback? Minus a data strategy, financial institutions will fail at AI
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Strategy and operations consulting FAQ
Strategy and operations consulting services help organizations develop a vision for their future and execute on practical plans to achieve it, including improving the processes and systems they need. These services typically include support to help:
- Develop strategy
- Evaluate growth opportunities
- Execute on organizational goals
- Improve processes
- Increase efficiency
- Reduce costs and waste
- Select software
- Manage change such as modernization, mergers or expansion
- Enhance financial performance
- Remove operational barriers to growth
Wipfli’s performance consulting services for businesses and organizations include:
- Strategy: Strategy development, strategy implementation and digital strategy development.
- Operations: Business process analysis and improvement, continuous improvement advisory, software selection, change management, project management and business analyst services.
The main outcome organizations can expect from strategy and operations consulting is better performance across their organization or in the specific process or function they want to address.
For strategy, Wipfli helps you move past static planning so that your organization can adapt to a challenging, rapidly evolving business environment.
Our focus on alignment keeps your people and strategy unified, so when change occurs, you’re prepared to pivot effectively. And we ground every plan in a deep understanding of your organization, allowing us to tie strategies directly to the gaps that are limiting performance while maintaining flexibility to respond as priorities shift.
For operations, Wipfli helps organizations identify the root causes of operational inefficiencies and redesign processes to improve consistency and reduce costs.
We work alongside your teams, leveraging our broad industry experience to better understand how you operate and to provide practical guidance on how to drive better, more sustainable performance. We also look at how technology can enable your vision, helping you select, implement and optimize solutions for real impact.
While every engagement is tailored to the specific client, Wipfli’s process for strategy and operations consulting is built on data, organizational objectives and industry-specific context.
Our process often includes:
- Discovery and assessment: Building an understanding of your organization’s strategy, culture, processes and technology.
- Strategy alignment: Connecting your challenges to actionable plans for improvement, and keeping your organization aligned on objectives.
- Implementation support: Applying proven methodologies to help you implement initiatives, technology and strategy effectively.
- Measurement and optimization: Tracking key metrics to demonstrate impact and identifying areas for improvement.
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