Resilience is a major mantra for Australia’s infrastructure sector, according to software provider Noggin. Many are seeking measures to adapt to and recover from disruptions while maintaining continuous operations.
Policymakers have put forth the Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) Act (2018) and other legislation seeking to help the nation’s infrastructure sector to anticipate, prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from hazards.
However, industrial supply-chain disruptions remain commonplace, with almost 80 per cent of organisations experiencing supply-chain disruptions, according to the BCI Supply Chain Resilience Report 2024.
However, there are a number of ways in which digital technology can help strengthen the supply-chain resilience of the nation’s infrastructure sector.
The global compliance picture
Global supply-chain challenges persist. A staggering nine in ten respondents to the McKinsey Global Supply Chain Leader Survey admitted that they encountered supply-chain challenges in 2024.
Policymakers around the world have also noticed the persistence of supply-chain issues and how frequently third-party failure and cyber-attacks cause supply-chain disruptions.
As a result, the UK government recently clarified provisions of the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, proposing to bring more suppliers under regulatory scrutiny as well as give regulators the ability to designate critical suppliers and demand that they embed stricter supply-chain security requirements.
Here in Australia, Critical Infrastructure Risk Management Program (CIRMP) requirements in the SOCI Act also mandate that the infrastructure sector addresses supply-chain hazards by:
- Identifying material risks where the occurrence of a hazard could have a relevant impact on the asset
- Minimising and eliminating the material risks of that hazard occurring
- Mitigating the relevant impact of that hazard on the asset
Ways in which digital technology can strengthen supply-chain resilience
Only 18 per cent of all organisations have increased the use of technology to map supply-chain disruptions as a direct result of increasing supply-chain pressures/vulnerabilities, according to the Business Continuity Institute (BCI).
But how can digital technology help strengthen supply-chain resilience?
1. Collaborate with third parties in a unified workspace
As recently as 2022, 45 per cent of respondents to McKinsey’s annual supply-chain survey said that they either had no visibility into their upstream supply chain or could only see as far as their first-tier suppliers.
One way to improve visibility and better manage risk across an organisation’s entire third-party ecosystem is to seamlessly collaborate with third parties in a unified workspace dedicated to enhancing resilience. That unified workspace can equip teams to pinpoint and address the top issues across their supplier ecosystem, from onboarding and due diligence to risk monitoring, contract, and action management.
Digital technology can support the monitoring of third parties on an ongoing basis through the collection of critical documentation, improving visibility in the process. This helps to ensure organisations have the right data to improve the resilience of their third-party ecosystem and can stay ahead of emerging threats, too.
2. Integrate third parties into resilience initiatives
Beyond collaborating with suppliers, infrastructure organisations may also want to integrate key third parties into their resilience initiatives. They can do this by incorporating third-party and supplier-risk management into their wider resilience workspaces. Such workspaces offer risk-intelligence capabilities for anticipating disruptions, functionality for collaboration during incident response, as well as risk assessments and dependency mapping to bolster preparedness.
3. Improve incident preparedness
The specialists at Noggin recommend that, if they haven’t started yet, infrastructure organisations should develop custom playbooks for supply-chain disruption scenarios that also complement the organisation’s existing incident, crisis management, and business continuity plans. From there, the plans should be digitised to provide easy access, enhanced coordination, and reduced risk of critical information being missed.
Digital technology can help. Organisations can use software to create incident response plans, using automated plans and checklist functionality, then conduct exercises on an ongoing basis to test preparedness, mitigation, and response.
Digital technology can also generate crisis and incident response action plans from a comprehensive library of best practices, or organisations can customise pre-existing strategies to align with their own requirements.
4. Maintain continuous improvement
Supply-chain resilience isn’t static. As the risk environment changes, efforts to maintain resilience have to evolve accordingly. Therefore, to ensure continuous improvement, infrastructure organisations will have to commit to collecting data from their ecosystem.
Digital technology can provide a central source of truth for that information, enabling organisations to leverage the data collected, as well as visualise it using configurable analytics to identify top issues and opportunities for improvement.
These insights can also be shared with internal stakeholders or externally with regulators to satisfy the organisation’s obligations.
Finally, more than five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chains remain fragile. Australia’s infrastructure sector, for its part, is feeling the effects. Fortunately, integrated resilience software, like Noggin, can help.
By facilitating engagement and collaboration across all stakeholders, integrated resilience software helps infrastructure organisations prepare for adverse events, stay ahead of potential supply-chain disruptions, and ensure a unified approach to resilience.
