For one thing, an expanding list of risks means there are more things to audit. Inevitably, at large companies a lot of stuff falls through the cracks - that is, if those companies bother doing meaningful audits at all.

For another, new kinds of risks are cropping up that may escape auditors' notice. Traditional supply-chain risks include demand and supply variability, limits on capacity, and quality issues. But those have been joined in recent years by such considerations as greater customer expectations; ever-increasing global competition; longer and more complex supply chains; increased product variety with shorter lifecycles; and security, political and currency risks.

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