Risk is an ever-present consideration, regardless of the sector where procurement activity is taking place. Examples are safety-critical equipment on aircraft, traceability of pharmaceutical feedstock and business continuity plans for strategic suppliers.
How do you plan to buy a high-risk, high-value product or service? You may find the following helpful, while recognising it is not intended as a full statement of requirements for such a plan. (more…)
Want to get your business to consider sustainability, but don’t know how? Try talking to them about risk.
That’s the advice of Professor Andrew Douglas from the University of the West of England. Addressing buyers at the Sustainable Purchasing & Supply Summit in London last month as he helped launch the CIPS Sustainability Index, Douglas said people now see the sustainability agenda as a way of managing risk. (more…)
Reducing exposure to suppler risk in a global sourcing environment requires a keen eye on five key factors. Here is how to cut complexity, effort and cost from the risk mitigation process. (more…)
Supplier failures have a habit of catching their customers unprepared and making the wrong type of headlines. When I wrote in January that sustainability would be a theme for procurement in 2013, little did I imagine it would be the European meat trade that would be providing the headlines. The disturbing news stories of contaminated meat being found in products across Europe underlines the importance of a robust supplier quality programme that goes beyond your first tier suppliers. (more…)
Some years ago, I was working for an organisation that had just won an enormous project. The project was highly complicated, hugely important strategically and required a large amount of skilled workers to deliver. As a member of the risk committee, I spent a great deal of time looking at potential issues, monitoring these, developing mitigating actions and generally trying to make sure everything stayed on track.
Then, one day, someone raised a very curious risk to the committee. A significant number of the team had entered a lottery syndicate and the risk that was presented was “what happens if they win the jackpot?”. (more…)
The great horse meat scandal has generated media and political outrage that displays a level of naivety of understanding of the business environment.
It also points to process and control failures in procurement and supplier relationship management which are potentially more serious. Press reports point to warnings to ministers that the conditions were in place for such risk to become reality. The warnings were apparently ignored, as they might also have been within firms along the food chain. (more…)
As supply chain management has become dependent on electronic systems it has simultaneously grown more vulnerable to attacks from external (or internal) sources. (more…)
It has been argued that £37 billion could be saved from UK public expenditure through improved procurement. But we cannot rebalance the nation’s accounts merely by aggregating then salami-slicing chunks of expenditure, any more than we can remedy areas of neglect by casting money at them. Real progress comes from setting well-evaluated near and longer-term objectives, and managing their achievement. (more…)
We’ve reported on how natural disasters, the economic stability of suppliers and commodity swings are affecting purchaser’s procurement choices, but are buyers closely monitoring political policy decisions to consider their potential impact? (more…)
The traditional view of risk management in procurement is one of mitigation, minimisation and opportunity cost. It is about contingency planning and ‘just in case’ thinking. Few companies look to risk management as a way to steal a march on their competition, but when a medium to long-term view of the inbound supply chain is taken, this is entirely possible. (more…)
Risk is an ever-present consideration, regardless of the sector where procurement activity is taking place. Examples are safety-critical equipment on aircraft, traceability of pharmaceutical feedstock and business continuity plans for strategic suppliers.![[Bloglines]](http://blog.supplymanagement.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
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