Question:
Organization must be confident in the capabilities and resiliency of their supply chains.
The lessons learned over the past several years from natural and human-caused disruptions demonstrate that supply chains cannot be taken for granted and that old approaches to risk mitigation and risk transfer require an upgrade to meet today’s challenges. Identify and describe the new risk mitigation strategies and how corporations continuously improve their supply chain resiliency.
Introduction
In today’s volatile and turbulent markets, supply chain vulnerability has become an issue of significance for many organizations. Supply chain become extensive and more complex as a result of global sourcing, continued trend to lean manufacturing, globally distributed operations, supply chains risk increases. The present challenge to corporation is to manage and mitigate risk through creating more resilient supply chains.
Demonstration of unforeseen past disrupting events in the global supply chain industry were the flooding in Thailand in late 2011—and Thailand being the second largest producing country of hard drives—product availability was down almost 30%, severely impacting the availability of computing products. In early 2011, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan virtually stopped the production of automobiles but also affected many parts used in the electronics industry. In early 2010, it was the volcano eruption in Iceland that blocked nearly 100,000 flights, disrupting travel and the shipment of high value material to and from Europe. The reality is that in a global supply chain, companies are significantly more exposed to geopolitical crises and natural disasters.
Disruptions in a supply chain are inevitable. Analysis of the risk associated with a supply chain should not reside on whether or not hostile event will occur; rather, the emphasis should be on developing and