… the RSS wrap

Not surprisingly there has been a lot of focus on Supply Chain impacts this week. The recent focus on air cargo is no doubt a part of it – but fortunately there is a growing understanding that BC (and resilience) has to address the entire value chain, not just the narrow silo of the core organisation.

The BCI have had a survey on Supply Chain failures in progress for some time. The survey finds, hardly surprising, that some areas of outsourcing are exposing firms to higher levels of supply chain risk!

The survey has a lot of stats about what type of events have actually impacted people this year, weather problems were the main thing this year. You can read the Executive Summary of the report here.

The title of Steve DeAngelis’ post, “Sense and Respond Supply Chains” also caught my attention. Unfortunately this was not exactly the same context that I was expecting (as in this discussion with Lee Spencer from earlier in the year). The concept of sense and respond is central to an adaptive crisis management capability.

Steve’s post does talk about some significant changes coming in supply chain that will have to be taken into account for our BC Programs. Consider this idea;

Procter & Gamble has publicly stated its goal of being able to make every SKU every day in its plants, recognizing the cost of the weeks of inventory its pipeline still holds after years of attention and improvement in the forecast-driven model.

The ultimate in Just-in-Time manufacture – and a potential nightmare if this highly collaborative “sense and respond” supply chain experiences a disruption. The need to share data and visibility will certainly challenge some organisations to seriously question their current cultural norms – another essential change required to build resilience.

Of course it is impossible to have a post on Supply Chain Risk and not have some reference to Jan Husdal. Fortunately he has a post this week reviewing the ISO/PAS 28002 “Security Management for the Supply Chain – Development of resilience in the Supply Chain”. A new addition to the 28000 family – and reading about it here is a lot cheaper than buying it!

And while it was not on the subject of Supply Chain, I have to share a piece of Risk Management wisdom. In the post “Baseball and Risk Management“, Trevor Levine (Riskczar) reminds us that we don’t just need all the information and data to be available. To make good risk assessments we need to ensure we can take the emotion out of the process – and also to be conscious of our cultural biases.

Enjoy some good weekend reading, and there is always next season Trevor.

What about those Giants?