24 Supply Chain Professionals Share Risk Management Best Practices and the Most Effective Ways to Reduce Supply Chain Risks
Camcode | January 19, 2017 –
In the supply chain, risks abound, impacting every facet of the business. From physically securing product throughout the supply chain to ensuring shipping accuracy, knowing the origin of your products (where your suppliers’ facilities are based) to gain a clearer risk profile, and more, there are countless risks that plague the supply chain. All of these risks must be carefully managed by supply chain leaders to preserve integrity and avoid passing risks on to customers, partners, and end consumers.
Managing and mitigating risk requires an in-depth understanding of the risks that exist throughout the entire supply chain and taking proactive measures to eliminate, or at least reduce, those threats. To gain some insight into the most effective supply chain risk management best practices and strategies, we reached out to a panel of supply chain and logistics experts and asked them to weigh in on this question:
“What’s the single most effective way that logistics and supply chain professionals can reduce or mitigate supply chain risks?”
Read on to find out what our experts had to say about the best ways to manage supply chain risks.
“There is not one single thing that can, in isolation, reduce risk across the supply chain…”
Like baking a cake, all ingredients must be present to be effective. However, organizations that take an integrated planning approach – aligning across the organization and supply chain partners – are better prepared to identify and respond to risks when they occur. An integrated planning approach creates cross functional visibility and communication, provides greater pulse upstream and downstream of the supply chain, and provides move visibility to alerts of inevitable disruptions before they actually happen. As groups become aligned to plan for and respond to risks quickly, logistics and operations become smoother because they are able to more accurately buffer against risk.
Other aspects to a more comprehensive risk management program to consider are: