Feature
SUPPLY CHAIN RISK SPECIAL
Chain reactions BY ARTHUR PIPER
The pandemic is wreaking havoc in global supply chains, yet businesses often fail to have a basic overview of their operations. Greg Schlegel says the time is right for risk managers to take up the challenge
Enterprise Risk
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n supply chain risk, time is money. The long delays at the UK border in January this year and the ongoing saga of the container ship Ever Given, which was stuck during April in the Suez Canal, are just two recent examples of how disruptive breaks in those chains can be. Companies did know that Brexit would cause delays and have known for years that the Suez Canal is narrow. The problem is that too many have a poor grasp of the complexity of their supply chains. “Most companies – small, medium or large – do not have good supply chain visibility,” Greg Schlegel, founder at The Supply Chain Risk Consortium, in New Jersey in the United States, says. And even where they have mapped their suppliers, they still
have more work to do. “Good visibility means, upstream, understanding who your suppliers are and what is going on with them, and, downstream, what is happening to your customers,” Schlegel says. “Everybody in this discipline starts with suppliers because they assume that is the riskiest area, because they don’t directly control them,” he says. Risk events downstream, such as a fire in a warehouse, can also have a serious impact on the business’s ability to operate. “Having this complete visibility is crucial for a simple reason: “What you don’t know about your supply chain can and will hurt you,” he says.
Pandemic The pandemic has been a global testing ground for supply chains, but most businesses have been 10
