How to attack supply chain risk
There’s a post over at Supplychainer talking about how you can attack supply chain risk. I posted a comment there but wanted to include it here for completeness.
** My comment **
I think the suggestions in the post are quite valid. However, I would argue that more is needed. The reality is that there’s no way to predict all the unexpected events that are going to pop up daily in a globally distributed supply chain that is faced with increasingly volatile demand and shortening product lifecycles.
To be proactive in dealing with these “make or break” situations, companies need to empower people with the visibility and tools (including collaborative scenario modeling capabilities) to act quickly and in accordance with corporate metrics. Why empower people? Because dealing with these high complexity, high risk decisions requires human judgment. By definition these unexpected events were not in the plan that everyone is trying to execute to. So, human judgment is going to be required to figure out the right tradeoffs and compromises to make.
