1. Opening up collaboration between companies and their suppliers in real time

Nothing has had any greater impact on reducing supply chain risk than the ability of networked cloud supply chain solutions to bring together companies with thousands of their suppliers and business partners on a 24/7 network. Supplier networks are complex, extended, and subject to many issues that can go wrong. Traditional internal supply chain systems like ERP (enterprise resource planning) were written to inter-connect internal departments within the enterprise, and are ill-positioned to deal with the external business processes that concern suppliers.

2. Managing multi-tier supplier networks

Today, there are cloud-based solutions that actually track multi-level suppliers that internal systems are unable to penetrate. Though these solutions probably can't monitor end to end quality in every situation, cloud has definitely opened visibility into "black box" supplier sub-contractors that enterprises formerly knew little about.

3. Identifying banned suppliers

Enterprises lose good will and can be penalized millions of dollars if they're found to be dealing with a trading party that turns out to be a terrorist organization, a drug dealer or a financially corrupt company.

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Keywords: Cloud Computing, SaaS, Supplier Management, Regulatory Compliance, Supply Chain Management Solutions