Category Archives: Supply Chain

You CAN NOT Protect Your Supply Chain Against Disruption Without Visibility!

A recent article on protecting your supply chain against disruption had some very good ideas for protecting your supply chain against disruption, but all were useless without visibility as most of them could not be carried out effectively without visibility. How critical is good visibility? Let’s review the suggestions.

Perform a supply chain vulnerability audit.

How can you assess vulnerability without a good supply chain map? Without visibility, how can you see beyond the first tier to find sole-source arrangements in the sub-tiers that are putting your entire supply chain at risk.

Do a rigorous “what-if” analysis.

If you don’t have a good map, you can’t analyze what would happen if you changed a supplier, changed a distribution lane, shifted production, etc.

Implement a strategic supply chain plan.

How can you judge the value of the plan if you can’t fully analyze the effects of its implementation and the chances of the mitigations it contains succeeding in the effect of a disruption? And, as per above, you need visibility for a full and proper analysis.

Create a balance between supply chain network efficiency and operations resilience.

The only way to determine if a plan is balanced is to do extensive what-if analyses that consider various perturbations of, and disruptions to, the normal scenario and see if the chain remains operational. These models can only be built with extensive visibility.

Design long-term strategies.

This also requires significant what-if analysis and detailed supply chain data, which in turn requires extensive supply chain visibility.

However, if you have good supply chain visibility, you can do all of this, and more, and truly secure your supply chain against significant disruption. And then you will have resiliency too. To find out more about the ROI of Supply Chain Resiliency, download the SI Illumination, sponsored by Resilinc.

Supply Management Has a Long Way To Go To Get to The Top!

The ISM and BravoSolution (who want to align Sourcing with the rest of the organization) recently released the 2013 ISM Survey of Procurement Executives on “Procurement & Sourcing: Moving from Tactical to Strategic” which summarized the responses from 545 Supply Management executives at the Director level and above to a detailed survey created by BravoSolution and administered by ISM last July and August.

These executives were given a list of 24 topics identified to be of recent concern to procurement and sourcing executives and asked to identify their top organizational priorities in 2013. The top priority of improving cost reduction and savings should not be a surprise to anyone since most companies have been laser-focussed on cost-reduction and savings since the major financial crisis in 2007-2008, to the detriment of just about every other important goal. However, what should be surprising is that cost reduction and savings is not only the top priority in 60% of companies but still twice as important as the second most common business priority of revenue growth and profit improvements despite the fact that most organizations expect their cost reduction efforts to yield less than 10%!

The time of near-zero inflation is at an end and with hyper-inflation a strong possibility in many commodity markets and a few countries, and, despite the opinion of some experts, we could be looking at a return of stagflation in some global economies. And even if we don’t see stagflation, the rapid rise in costs across a number of raw material and commodity categories should be enough to convince the average Supply Management professional that savings will not be possible in many categories and the best one can hope for is cost avoidance — unless other opportunities for savings are identified. Opportunities that revolve around process improvement, raw material substitution, value-add, and non-value add service removal. This means that more effort should be spent on supplier collaboration and innovation, supplier performance and sustainability management, and raw materials, but the first two of these options were only listed as priorities by 19% and 23% of the respondents, respectively, and the third option didn’t even make the list of the 9 topics that were selected by more than 10% of respondents.

It was nice to see that 30% of respondents recognized that a key capability of properly performed Procurement is the delivery of revenue growth and profit improvement, but this doesn’t happen without the proper focus on efforts that can lead to revenue growth and profit improvement, which include efforts like the Procurement Perfect Order (which will make your organization a more attractive supplier), improvement of working capital (which will allow Finance to reduce interest and penalty payments, take advantage of early payment discounts, and possibly even earn money on short term investments), improving customer loyalty (as it costs less to keep a customer than to acquire a new one), improving the strategic nature of trading partner relationships (as this can lead to joint efforts to take cost out of products and services and increase sales), and more spend under management (which permits better spend and opportunity analysis). However, from this set up of options, only two — getting more spend under management and improving working capital — were selected as priorities by more than 10% of respondents. Without appropriate priorities, profit and revenue goals are just pipe dreams.

There’s a fair amount of analysis in the 23 page report, but the bottom line is that Supply Management has a long way to go to become the strategic powerhouse it should be. It’s just like Angus, Malcolm, and Bon said back in 1975 — It’s a Long Way To the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll). A long, long way …

A Major Disruption to Supply Chains Occurs Every Day – Is Yours Ready?

In 2013, Resilinc, a provider of supply chain resiliency soutions, reported 355 major Event Notifications that significantly impacted all supply chains that were in the vicinity of, or connected to, the event, which included natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornado, extreme weather, and other force majuere events), man-made disasters (factory fires/explosions, power outages/shortages, factory shut-downs, chemical spills, etc.), extreme economic events (labour strikes, bankruptcies, port disruptions, levying of major fines, etc.), geopolitical events (acquisitions, rioting, FDA actions, etc.), and recalls, to name a few. Some of these events, such as bankruptcies, were localized to a few dozen companies that depended on the supplier that went bankrupt, but others, such as the Solomon Islands earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan or the Haiyan Typhoon in the Philippines (that wiped out a number of coastal cities) affected thousands of sites and the tens of thousands of supply chains that depended on the suppliers that had factories, warehouses, and/or other operations at those sites.

The impact of these events on their respective supply chains ranged from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of millions. If a factory that produces a critical single-sourced component for your most profitable product line is destroyed, the costs associated with finding a new source — which include, but are not limited to, manpower costs, premium production costs, premium raw material costs, downtime costs, lost customer costs, etc. — add up quickly and can easily run into the tens of millions for large high tech, equipment manufacturing, aerospace, and automotive companies.

But if your company is prepared, most of these costs can be mitigated. How do you prepare? You make the right investments in supply chain resiliency. To find out how to get support from the C-Suite for these investments, tune into this Wednesday’s webcast on Justifying Investments in Supply Chain Resiliency in 2014, sponsored by Sourcing Innovation and Resilinc.

10 Years Ago Today Gave Us Proof That Even the Improbable Is Likely

When a decomposing sperm whale spontaneously exploded in the town of Tainan, Taiwan whilst being transported for a postmortem examination. (Source: Wikipedia) The exploding whale splattered blood and whale entrails over surrounding shop fronts, bystanders, and cars. No one was hurt, but likely quite a few people were shocked. Plus the blood and other stuff that blew out on the road was disgusting, and the smell was really awful.

This just goes to show that no matter how unlikely a disruptive event is in the context of your supply chain, it could still happen and you should be prepared when it does.

Justifying 2014 Investments in Supply Chain Resiliency

Are you looking to justify investments in supply chain risk and resiliency programs in 2014?

Can you determine a return on investment (ROI) from investing in supply chain resiliency?

How are other organizations leveraging supply chain resiliency solutions to drive real business benefits?

If you want to learn the answer to these questions, and more, attending the complementary upcoming webinar from Resilinc and Sourcing Innovation on Justifying 2014 Investments in Supply Chain Resiliency on January 29, 2014 @ 11 am PT, 14 pm ET, and 19 pm GMT.

Supply chain resiliency is becoming more important daily because the frequency, magnitude, and associated costs of supply chain disruptions are steadily increasing.

This webinar will examine the different types of cost savings and examples that can be obtained through a proactive supply chain risk and resiliency strategy based on multi-tier supply chain visibility.

Looking forward to seeing you there!