Summary
Staying ahead of trends and disruptions requires resilience. Consumer product organizations, brands and retailers can proactively address complexity by strengthening resilience today. That means working through key steps and embracing an integrated strategy for cultivating resilience not just now, but as a way of working and innovating over the long term.
At EY, we recommend consumer brands and retailers work through four key steps to kickstart resilience building:
1. Define what resilience means to your organization today.
Conduct a survey to paint a clear picture of your organization’s resilience maturity level. It can be challenging to gain visibility into the direct and indirect impacts of a business’s actions and operations, as well as understanding the incoming changes and trends happening in the broader world. Leaders who get insights more quickly and cross-functionally can evaluate potential actions or areas for continuous improvement in the business more quickly and proactively.
At EY, our dashboard tool puts connected data and cross-functional insights in the hands of business leaders with a customized view of the horizon, providing intel on trends that could have impacts on a given business sector. This allows business leaders to spend more time considering how they can plan for coming changes, capitalize on new opportunities and strengthen the core of their own business operations.
Questions you should ask at this stage
- Do we have a core risk management practice in place?
- Where do gaps lie across the process?
2. Identify critical enablers of business strategy.
Facilitate a workshop with the executive team to unpack critical enablers of the business and strategy as well as internal and external ecosystem drivers. With this information, you can then review survey results and define a clear resilience timeline to marshal progress.
Questions you should ask at this stage
- Do we have a centralized process for key business metrics?
- Are we systematically measuring performance impact of process improvements?
3. Outline core impact area resilience concerns.
This should include financial, organizational, talent, market, brand, operations, logistics, supply chain and IT.
Questions you should ask at this stage
- How can we create a framework for root cause analysis?
- What additional concerns loom on the horizon and how will we track them over time?
4. Create a resilience initiative roadmap.
Integrated efforts and shared ownership over the four pillars of resilience require a clear roadmap to guide stakeholders and empower folks to work together. This unifies efforts and helps people sing off the same proverbial song sheet as they build resilience through an enterprise lens.
Questions you should ask at this stage:
- What are our key priorities for each fundamental pillar, and who will own these respective areas?
- How will we report, track and share progress to inform subsequent stages of our action plan to scale enterprise resilience across units and teams?
With that foundation in place, you’ll want to stay informed by continuously monitoring the landscape for potential risks, and proactively managing challenges or seeking the advice of independent professionals. This culture of resilience also lends itself naturally to strong, collaborative partnerships across the C-suite and operational roles. This is vital to long-term resilience. You need an operating environment in which the Chief Risk Officer, Chief Resilience Officer and Chief Security Officer are empowered to problem solve together.
