Visibility, risk management and compliance must be optimized for a successful supply chain, says Karin Stevens, executive vice president and chief marketing and product officer at Overhaul.

Collaboration with partners is an essential part of a company’s supply chain resiliency strategy, but it doesn’t end with Tier 1 or 2 partners, Stevens says. It must extend much further. Absent that, the degree of visibility one needs in order to know exactly where products are in the supply chain, and what the risk management needs, are isn’t really there.

“When I think about risk profile, I think about what is the risk tolerance of your product from a logistic standpoint,” Stevens says. “Obviously, understanding risk is about on-time deliveries and what delays and disruptions will look like. It’s also about anticipating disruptions and knowing what to do when those happen. But specifically with the risk management piece, I look at what the specific product is and understand whether there's a tolerance to certain spoilage events, temperature, deviations and so forth. Is the product of a particularly high value or interesting for the black market? So I look at that as a consideration as you're building out your risk profile and really thinking through what that means in your tolerance.”

One’s strategy must include a solution for collaborating with partners to get the right visibility to build in a rules engine and in service-level agreements that can support flagging for risky situations.

Such a strategy isn’t about being punitive with the partner network, Stevens says. “It’s about working in collaboration with suppliers, because then you can get the right data to inform and make the right business decisions across the entire ecosystem.”

Among other things, insurance rates are at stake. Driving the right behaviors across the supply chin spectrum ensures that premiums can be contained or lowered.