Lee Young, director of supplier quality at Thermo Fisher Scientific, explains the company's approach risk management, and how it copes with issues such as sole sourcing and supplier qualification.
Why is sole-supplier sourcing a potential problem for supply chains, and what should companies do to mitigate the risk? Jillian Alexander, managing director of Conduit Consulting LLC, provides some answers.
A third (35 percent) of businesses in the manufacturing industry are extremely concerned about potential supply chain disruption, according to research released by BSI, the business standards company and the Business Continuity Institute (BCI).
Analyst Insight: In 2010, as we began to offer a supply chain risk management class at Lehigh, our body of knowledge continued to expand and migrated into a very effective methodology to review, evaluate and benchmark a company's end-to-end supply chain maturity and inherent risk. The methodology encompassed 100 questions-of-discovery across 10 tenets of the supply chain resulting in a Red, Yellow & Green "spider diagram" profile of a company's supply chain maturity and inherent risk. – Gregory L. Schlegel, Founder, The Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium, and Adjunct Professor, Supply Chain Risk Management, Lehigh University
In the late 1680s, a group of ship owners, merchants and ships' captains - in essence, the supply chain managers of the day - transformed global commerce by "inventing" business insurance. In 2015, the insurance industry will return the favor by supporting supply chain innovation through sharing the tools that insurers have depended on to predict and quantify risk. How and why (now) will that happen? And what do supply chain stakeholders need to do?
More than 4,400 ships bring nearly $400bn worth of goods through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, a crucial link in the global supply chain of factories, warehouses, docks, highways and rail lines. Most blue-collar workers along the chain have seen their wages slashed with the quick rise of global trade. But the longshoremen who move the goods the shortest distance, between ship and shore, have shrewdly protected pay that trumps that of many white-collar managers.
Seeing what is happening to their customers and feeling the heat from possible threats, technology companies are increasing spending on security for their own systems, according to a survey of chief financial officers. Meanwhile, incentives to spend big on security are still in short supply for retailers and other private companies.
Trace One has joined with SGS to create an integrated platform that provides "farm-to-fork" visibility throughout the supply chain for brand owners, manufacturers and suppliers.
