By The Time You Detect Financial Risk …

… it’s too late. As per this article on the quality and performance connection of supply risk, indicators of financial risk are usually preceded by a slow decline in quality or performance that is difficult to detect from delivery to delivery as suppliers, looking to survive, begin to cut corners that they hope will go unnoticed but which often compound the farther up the supply chain you go.

As the author, Jim Lawton of D&B notes, you need to consider supplier performance metrics to be the best leading indicator of overall supplier financial viability. This means that you need to define a process to monitor quality and performance from a risk perspective. Do this by:

  • identifying which areas of supply where quality, performance, and/or financial risk factors are likely to be most pronounced;
  • defining a way to track and measure performance using delivery, performance, and other system data;
  • aggregating the data regularly for analysis;
  • creating corrective action plans to be implemented as soon as elevated risk is development; and
  • creating a closed-loop process that continually monitors and assesses risk information to insure that risks are detected early enough to permit the corrective action plans to be undertaken successfully.

And maybe you won’t be the one that finds out about an impending supplier bankruptcy after it’s too late!

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