There Are At Least 12 Risk Disconnects … but One You Should Never Overlook!

Over on Spend Matters Pro [membership required], the maverick is running a 12-part Pro series on The 12 Supply Risk Disconnects that Destroy Value that you really should check out. These disconnects not only increase Procurement and Supply Management risks across the board, but often end up destroy all the hard-earned value Procurement tried to extract from the sourcing event or push into the contract.

All of the risks are important, but the most critical in SI’s view is the disconnect between risk and cost. Why?

  1. Not only can one identifiable supply chain disruption not only wipe out all the savings, but increase cost beyond the current solution but
  2. Only an understanding of the true cost of risk will convince most stakeholders and executives to look beyond cost, reliability, marketing differentiation, or whatever else matters most to them. Money talks, and (potential) loss is the one thing that gets noticed.

As the maverick points out, supply risk basically overlays the dimensions of external VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) on top of the quality value stream and you have to minimize TCO in the face of varying levels of risk. This creates the challenge of how to place a price tag on that risk and another price tag on the cost of mitigating those risks, which is driven both by the outside-in risk you face and also your current level of risk management capabilities. Which is easier said than done, but without a solid understanding of the cost of risk, and an ability to model it against the cost of a buy, you can’t truly optimize your overall total cost of ownership, of a potential buy.

But you need to, and you need to acquire an optimization-backed sourcing solution to model the true cost of each option to make risk-aware Procurement decisions. Because then, as SI pointed out in an earlier post, you can not only Define [True] Procurement Success, but enable it.