Buckle up, world. The supply chain disruptions of recent years aren’t stopping anytime soon.

“The world is far more volatile, [and] getting more volatile all the time,” Ted Stank, co-executive director of the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Haslam College of Business, told CFO Brew.

Even as supply chain disruptions become increasingly visible, there’s a reason supply chains stay out of sight and mind most of the time.

“I always tell students, supply chains are like a bunch of dominoes, and they all have to fall down, right? If you take one domino out of that chain, the whole chain fails, and supply chains are like that,” Lance Saunders, a professor of supply chain management at UTK’s Haslam College, told CFO Brew. “Most people don’t see that because supply chains work, and it’s because they work most of the time [that] you’re not seeing all those steps that have to happen to make that package show up at your door.”

But when they don’t? Oof. Supply chain disruptions have fairly obvious cost implications, Stank and Saunders noted: missed sales, increased transportation and inventory costs, paying overtime for workers, operating plants on double or triple shifts due to closures elsewhere.

This article isn’t about those costs, though. It’s about everything CFOs may be overlooking while scrambling to address those costs.

Click here for more on the hidden costs of a supply chain disruption.—NP

While it might be an underappreciated function, enterprise risk management (ERM) can play a key role in decision-making for executives, including the CFO, experts said at a recent conference.

A pair of risk professionals speaking at RIMS’ ERM conference offered examples of how their organizations’ leaders have benefited from the practice of looking at enterprise risk holistically across a number of processes.

“One of the best examples of this is how we integrated ERM into our budgeting process,” Marianne Roth, chief risk officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said.

All aboard. Roth said when the bureau got a new CFO, he agreed to use the CFPB’s “risk profile as an input to the budget process.” This meant that “every budget request had to be referenced against” a specific risk with an explanation of how the request could help mitigate that risk.

The process was “a little bit messy” at the onset, Roth admitted; a lot of people asked how to tie risks into their budget requests. To iron out those wrinkles, Roth sat down with the bureau’s risk owners (those accountable for one of the bureau’s enterprise risks) and members of its risk management council to lay out their mitigation strategies.

For more on ERM best practices, click here.—AZ

Amid a cooling labor market, it can be hard to tell if retention strategies are actually working. But Yelp may have found the key to keeping its employees around.

Yelp’s average employee tenure increased from 2.8 years in 2022 to four years in May—that’s notable, considering the average tenure in the information industry is 4.2 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It certainly has been a pretty significant increase…in a pretty short period of time,” Carmen Amara, Yelp’s chief people officer, told HR Brew.

She attributes the boost to three internal programs, including revamped approaches to employee feedback, career development, and embracing flexible work.

Employee feedback. Since the start of the pandemic, but particularly in the last two years, Amara’s team has been reworking Yelp’s employee feedback mechanisms.

The company solicits feedback from employees via an annual engagement survey (at the corporate level), focus groups, meetings, and other sources like Slack channels.

Click here to keep reading HR Brew’s story on how Yelp increased employee retention.—PM