Author: Manoj Puthenveetil
April 29, 2025 - 6 MIN. READ
Key takeaways:
Contractors, are you waiting longer for supplies?
Nine out of ten businesses report disruptions in their supply chains, so delays and higher prices seem to be here to stay.
While you don't have control over global supply chains, you have control over one thing: how disruptions impact your business.
With the right risk management processes in place, you can lessen the blow from shortages and disruptions. The good news is that AI can help you manage risk when buying!
Supply chain risks fall into different categories. Cataloging every existing risk isn't possible - instead, you should aim to gain a global understanding of common stress scenarios and how they could affect you.
Remember that supply chain risks can be internal or external when conducting your risk analysis. Some can shape supply chains for years, while others will appear and disappear overnight.
What if one of your suppliers failed? It happens more often than you might think. On average, businesses have a survival rate of 50% after five years. After ten years, this rate drops to 34%.
Besides failure, events like leadership transitions or labor challenges can affect supplier reliability.
A quarter of supply chain professionals identify conflicts as one of the top risks. Recently, conflicts in Ukraine and the Red Sea have impacted supply chain management.
Conflicts aren't the only geopolitical factor to include in buying risk management frameworks: the Trump administration's tariff policy is already affecting international markets.
Among supply chain professionals, 99% report seeing the effect of climate change on their sourcing processes.
Hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, and other extreme events can lead to unforeseen disruptions, especially as the supply chain is increasingly global.
A cyber-attack can bring your enterprise supply chain to a standstill. Your buying risk team needs to work closely with IT experts to protect your systems from attacks. It's also important to pick vendors who prioritize cybersecurity.
Many organizations in the trades are also vulnerable to these risks:
Most of the time, disruptions in your usual enterprise supply chain mean spending more. If a supplier struggles to ship something, competitors will take advantage of it and raise their prices.
Even if a competitor isn't looking to charge more, factors like taking a different shipping route or undergoing additional compliance hurdles can lead to higher prices.
Besides increasing your base and shipping costs, supply chain disruptions make costs hard to predict, impacting your quote and proposal process.
Lead times are also an issue. They've been longer since COVID-19 (partly due to freight issues in the U.S.). Electrical contractors report waiting 28 to 48 weeks for panelboards!
Longer lead times (or delays linked to your team having to look for alternative suppliers) mean that projects take longer. It's not an ideal experience for your customers, especially if you exceed the initial timeline you gave them.
For contractors, adopting effective risk management practices often translates into broadening their supply chain - and working with a larger pool of vendors.
As a result, procurement can become fragmented. Your team might struggle with visibility over your spending, and applying best practices for quality sourcing can become challenging. Ultimately, your team will spend more time on procurement, and your costs might increase.
Disruptions to the trades supply chain aren't going away anytime soon. In fact, they could get worse.
The solution? Build a resilient procurement process. The following strategies will help you leverage AI for a cost-effective approach to risk management.
If you're working with a wider pool of suppliers, you're likely dealing with a fragmented process. Consolidating data from multiple sources is the answer to fragmentation - and AI can help.
AI is an amazing tool for pulling structured and unstructured data from different sources. And thanks to AI's ability to analyze this data, you can get better visibility into your spending and whether your purchases meet your internal requirements.
With a data-driven buying process in place, you can start adding more suppliers to your pool. Plus, AI is great for quickly vetting new vendors and identifying alternative products. This will make you more reactive as prices and lead times go up.
The modern supply chain is digital. You're not only placing orders online: Communication and other processes are also digital.
With AI, you can save time by pulling inventory and pricing data from all your suppliers and consolidating it in one place. You can also streamline discussions about contracts and buying terms.
AI-driven automation will make you more reactive, even when things are uncertain. Look into using AI to place bulk orders when prices drop. This simple but effective strategy can insulate your business from fluctuating prices and inventory shortages.
Predictive analytics are the secret to AI-driven risk reduction. AI makes deeper insights possible, helping you predict upcoming changes in pricing, lead times or availability. Because it can combine your historical data with data-driven insights from the market, AI is excellent for spotting new trends and supporting better decisions.
Supply chain disruptions are here to stay. Your buying team needs to adapt and build a more resilient process.
Raiven can help. As a leading network that brings together over 2,500 contractors and suppliers, Raiven gives you access to a vast network of vendors. When prices or availability changes, you can easily pivot to another option and still complete the job on time.
Plus, Raiven's AI-enhanced platform makes AI adoption easy. You can leverage this tech to compare prices in real-time and always get the best deal.
Raiven is on a mission to transform buying for the trades. Our innovative platform connects contractors, enterprises and suppliers into a digital supply chain network.
The goal is to simplify sourcing, reduce costs and unlock operational efficiency. New business opportunities become available, and you can scale faster.
Stop wasting time and money on inefficient procurement! As a Raiven member, you’ll get access to:
Visit Raiven for more information about our digital supply chain network.