2023 Anticipated Supply Chain Trends and Themes

Will 2022 supply chain trends like resiliency, sustainability, and collaboration continue — and what new themes emerge?

Resiliency stays the top priority for procurement teams. Many buyers built redundancy into their supply base in 2022, adding backup suppliers for critical categories. In 2023, that work shifts from stopgap sourcing to structural change: teams map dependencies deeper into their supply chains, tracking not just direct suppliers but the sub-suppliers those vendors rely on.

Sustainability moves from a reporting exercise to a sourcing criterion. Buyers increasingly ask suppliers for emissions data, labor practices, and diversity credentials before award, not after. Regulatory pressure adds urgency: disclosure rules in the EU and growing customer demand in the US push procurement teams to collect supplier ESG data on a standard cadence instead of once a year.

Collaboration extends past the buyer-supplier relationship. Procurement, legal, finance, and category teams increasingly work from one supplier record instead of separate spreadsheets and email threads. That shift reduces the back-and-forth that slows onboarding and contract renewal.

A new theme for 2023: procurement leaders keep returning to a common bottleneck — fragmented supplier masters. Tools that orchestrate workflows without fixing the record, or suites that take years to deploy, both leave gaps. Platforms that offer modular SLM plus orchestration are built for that reality.

Together, these four themes point to the same conclusion. Resiliency, sustainability, and collaboration goals all depend on accurate, current supplier data. Without a single, trusted supplier record, each initiative competes for the same manual data-entry effort, and progress on one often stalls the others.

Vaguely familiar: what carries over from 2022

The last several years brought more than their share of surprises, and several of them stay in place.

Economic volatility. Recent inflation figures and ongoing recession concerns drive 2023 volatility. Governments eased pandemic-related restrictions to support economic recovery, but other factors keep solid stability out of reach.

Labor interests. Personnel shortages, illness, and staff burnout continue into the new year, alongside a higher cost of living and active campaigns for increased wages, better work/life balance, and workable return-to-office policies.

Geopolitical and climate disruption. The specific 2022 headlines — bomb cyclones, freak waves, civil protests, active wars — will not repeat exactly, but weather-related disaster and political unrest remain an ongoing feature of 2023, and no near-term peace option is visible in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Israel, or Haiti.

Resiliency and agility. A recent McKinsey survey found that fewer than half the companies interviewed understood their Tier 1 supplier locations or the top risks those suppliers faced. Deeper Tier 1 understanding is where to start: the world does not snap back to 2019 levels of global commerce, so buyers need supplier awareness and collaboration to work through the volatility that carries over.

On the rise

Some long-standing trends are expected to intensify. Existing processes may handle prior levels and still need recalibrating for 2023 volumes.

Cyber threats. 2023 is expected to bring more data risk and more cyber-criminal activity. Raise employee awareness now, and put system, data, and human policies and protections in place before the exposure grows.

Technology investments. Technology spend reinvigorates as businesses optimize new workforce arrangements and drive efficiency. Remote work has already shown where the investment is most needed.

Sustainability scrutiny. Investors, customers, and regulators all press for environmental sustainability. In Descartes’ survey of consumer sentiment around sustainable delivery, 39% of respondents said they “regularly” or “always” make purchasing decisions based on the company’s or product’s environmental impact. That scrutiny now reaches Scope 3 emissions under the proposed US SEC rules for publicly traded companies.

Government oversight. The German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act takes effect in January 2023, requiring businesses to monitor their entire supply chain for environmental degradation. Other countries and regions are expanding policy, awareness, and fines for infractions on the same lines.

Work out where each of these presents an opportunity and where it presents a threat. The beginning of the year is the moment to confirm that every one of them has a named owner and a fixed review interval, because proactive monitoring is what turns a 2023 fluctuation into a response rather than a surprise.

Shiny new and emerging

The start of 2023 also introduces trends that are worth becoming familiar with and tracking now, before they are large enough to force a reaction.

The N-tier problem. The same McKinsey survey found that only 2% of companies had visibility into their suppliers at the third tier and beyond. Digitizing supplier processes early in 2023 frees the resources needed to build that deeper N-tier picture, which takes alignment and cooperation from Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 suppliers alike.

ESG compliance. From January 2023 the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act requires monitoring the complete supply chain for human rights violations as well as environmental impact. Emerging regulation enforces a holistic approach to ESG rather than a single-aspect one, with larger penalties and confirmed means of enforcement.

Oversupply. As consumer demand softens, an oversupply of goods produces volatile price drops. The ING Trade Outlook 2023 states that “there are simply not enough silver linings to keep global goods trade robustly flowing.” Oversupply can cut shipping costs and open access to discounted goods; it is equally a threat to sales and projected profit.

Value ecosystem. Simon Geale, EVP at Proxima, coined the term in the 2023 CPO report: “We must understand our relationship with customers, suppliers, stakeholders, competitors, shareholders, employees, regulators, etc. — our ‘value ecosystem’.” It ties broad ESG regulation to the need for n-tier transparency, and recognizes that every player in a supply chain operates inside the same interconnected system.

Where to start in 2023

Improved supply chain collaboration, alignment, and transparency are what prepare an organization for the unknown unknowns. Start the year by digitizing manual supplier processes, building the dashboards and reports that monitoring and required disclosure depend on, and aligning suppliers through consistent RFx, performance scorecards, and open communication lines.