Welcome back to another installment of Whitepaper Wednesday here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. This week, I’ll be reviewing a whitepaper entitled “The Intersection of Analytics and Supply Chain Risk Management — Using Intelligence to Drive Early Intervention.” This whitepaper is part of the exciting new “Spend Matters Compass” series of research from, of course, Spend Matters.
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Cutting right to the chase, the point of this whitepaper is to tell you that one-dimensional approaches to supply chain risk management are not enough. Instead, using multiple sources of data and available software will help you identify and mitigate risk faster and better.
So, what’s wrong with some more traditional approaches to supply chain risk management, such as obtaining D&B supplier data with periodic refreshes?
The whitepaper argues that “the speed with which a supplier’s financial and operational situation can rapidly deteriorate outpaces the scheduled content updates, leaving the organization with a false sense of assurance that it is actively monitoring its supply base for various risk factors.” In contrast, technology-enabled approaches to supply chain risk management can “examine alternative options at the point of query and analysis,” “rapidly drill down into an analysis to understand potential root causes of risk elements,” and “bridge currently existing information silos / gaps between a variety of internal, supplier and third-party information sources.”
What kind of tools are there that can do these things? The whitepaper neatly categorizes the solutions into four categories: spend visibility, supplier information management, supplier performance management, and stand-alone risk management solutions. Each category is defined and explained in the whitepaper and providers of each category of solution are shared. Some of these providers are sponsors of the whitepaper, some aren’t.
The whitepaper closes with seven action steps that a procurement department can take when refining its supply chain risk management approach. This whitepaper is not a one-stop shop for everything you need to know to prevent any supply chain risk from coming to fruition – nor do I believe that it was intended to be – but it is quite helpful in terms of educating procurement leaders about the tools that are available in the market. It consolidates the names of providers who you may not have come across with hurried research (is there another kind of research in today’s crazy procurement environment?) and can help you set a direction for what you want to see.
You can download your own copy of this whitepaper directly from Spend Matters.
To Your Career,
Charles Dominick, SPSM
President & Chief Procurement Officer
Next Level Purchasing, Inc.
Struggling To Find More Good Resources For Procurement Leaders?
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http://www.NextLevelPurchasing.com/WPcharles