Top executives the world over spend a lot of time and effort to manage delays or disruptions in their companies' supply chains – with widely varying results.

UPS Capital Corp. has expanded its Jeweler's Elite Program to San Francisco, Philadelphia and Providence, R.I. Designed to help jewelers protect their high-value shipments, the service combines UPS shipping with insurance offered through UPS Capital Insurance Agency, Inc.

AEB (Asia Pacific) Pte Ltd., a provider of information technology for global trade and logistics, has developed a new version of its ASSIST4 Monitoring and Alerting application.

In 2010, massive flooding in Pakistan profoundly affected the country and disrupted supply chains globally, spiking international prices for cotton, rice and wheat. This was only one in a string of weather disasters - including heat waves, hurricanes and wildfires - that have affected supply chains on a large scale in the past decade.

ProSight Specialty Insurance has partnered with SmartDrive Systems to offer SecureFleet, a complimentary risk-management application developed for ProSight's niche transportation customers.

SC-Integrity Inc., also known as Lojack SCI, is partnering with Locus Traxx Worldwide to provide customers with technology for enhancing supply-chain and cargo security.

As manufacturers seek to source quality goods at the lowest cost, supply chains that were once confined to a single country or continent have stretched around the world. Managers have become adept at addressing recurrent risks—frequent, low-impact incidents such as demand fluctuations or supply delays that affect efficiency. However, they have devoted less energy to designing supply chains that prevent or mitigate the impact of disruptive risks such as labor strikes, political unrest, regulatory shifts, and natural disasters. These events can have severe and lasting repercussions on operations, so manufacturers would do well to devise strategies that alleviate this risk.