Here at SI, the doctor certainly hopes so because you are going to get hit with at least one disruption this year, and chances are it is going to be fairly significant. (I.E. one that will result in, at least, a 3-month stock-out if not promptly mitigated, and not a 3-day stock out that, unless you are Apple launching an iPhone, won’t affect sales noticeably.)
As regular readers know, risk is still increasing, and the odds of your organization not getting hit with at least one significant disruption over the next 12 months is, at best, 1 in 10. You have better odds of winning a prize in a Lotto 6/49 draw (in Ontario, Canada where you win a Free Ticket and effectively get your investment matched on the next draw when your ticket matches 2 of 6 numbers) than of not experiencing a significant supply chain disruption over the next twelve months. Ouch!
But you’re overworked, underpaid, and not trained in risk management and probably don’t have a game plan yet. So what can you do?
Well, you can start by checking out the doctor‘s and the maverick‘s recent four part series on Your Supply Risk Management 2016 Game Plan over on Spend Matters Plus (membership required) which dives deep into how you can best define manage your supply risk programs. This series:
- defines the types of supply disruption, product cost volatility, regulatory compliance, and reputation risk you need to plan for
- explains why you have to think global and implement local to develop an effective strategy
- gives you strategies to identify primary risks, mitigations, indicators, and monitors
- helps you understand how you can align risk and reward to get support
- helps you understand how to get more C-level visibility
- and presents a scoring methodology that demonstrates business impact, which is critical to getting C-Level support
All four parts were up as of last month, and all four are a must read for anyone who needs to get a grip on supply risk and how to handle it. Don’t wait until it bites you in your backside three days after a critical order was supposed to arrive (but didn’t because the tier 1 supplier decided not to tell you when the tier 2 supplier didn’t supply the raw material needed for production, which is no longer available because a mine collapse reduced the available, limited, global supply by 10%). The bite a supply disruption can take out of your business is much worse than a boghog will take out of your backside. So SI strongly recommends you check out the following now: