This content was published on the ATSC Blog on July 27, 2020 Since risk is a reality in business, and ‘certainty’ is an extremely expensive proposition, an enterprise’s appetite for risk has always be...

This content was posted on the ATSC blog on February 24, 2020 Acute awareness of China’s impact on global business has been front and center since the onset of the Coronavirus health emergency in late...

 Supply Chain Risk, by John Manners-Bell, provides a structured look at risk by establishing a series of intersecting dimensions. First the author outlines external risk categories: Environmental...

“When considering any contribution that risk management can make to the organization, it is important to decide whether the contribution will relate to strategy, projects and/or operations. The decisi...

“Efficient, effective, risk-centric, and risk-adjusted third party lifecycle and risk management is a new and distinct way of doing business. How your company approaches any major change like this one...

 Supply chains are similar to humans—imperfect. Their successes within business plans are a product of accurately forecasting how to survive crises and minimize damage in high-risk scenarios. Bal...

We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.” Choosing to dual source a category means using two (or more) suppliers to provide identical copies of a product or service. Many c...

As another month comes to an end, we can expect the schedule of events to pick up. There are 8 webinars and 1 virtual event taking place this week, including our next AOP Live session on Tuesday, feat...

I was really looking forward to this event, and it did not disappoint. This is the first event I have attended by Preparis (providers of an emergency preparedness suite) and I will add them to my list of sources for future webinars. Kudos to Bill Michaels (CEO, ADR North America), David Landsman (Director of Strategic Alliances, MFG.com) and Armistead Whitney (CEO, Preparis) for an exceptionally well done event. You can click here to listen to the event archive.

Before I even begin my notes, let me just point out that if you are not a member of the Next Level Purchasing Association, you are missing out. Next Level Purchasing offers the SPSM (Senior Professional in Supply Management) certification program. Joining the association is absolutely free and comes with a number of benefits, such as members-only webinars, newsletters, and networking opportunities. If you want to get your feet wet with the kind of programs they offer, there are several mini-courses they offer, completely online and for less than $20! Interested? Good for you! Click here to learn more by clicking on the NLP logo on our partner page. That way Buyers Meeting Point gets credit for your purchase and a portion of the proceeds go to charity.

This week’s featured webinar notes are from an event hosted on Thursday by Supply and Demand Chain Executive, “Supply Chain Risk Mitigation: Minimizing Exposure To Supplier Failure, Volatile Commodity Prices, And Manufacturing Disruption’.

This week I attended ISM's webinar on mitigating supplier risk. The event recording can be viewed here.

“Risk management is not a purchasing initiative. It’s an initiative and philosophy that has to be embraced by the entire organization.”

-- Rose Kelly-Falls Senior VP Supply Chain Risk, Rapid Ratings and event panelist

This week’s webinar notes are from a February 13^th webinar hosted by IASTA and featuring a panel of speakers. An on demand version of the event is available on their website.

This week BMP attended Gartner’s webinar titled ‘The Comprehensive Guide to Effective Vendor Management’ with Research VP Helen Huntley. Below are our notes. The archived recording can be found here.

This week’s webinar notes are from a July 31^st event hosted by ISM and presented by LexisNexis. The event is available on demand on ISM’s site. If you are interested in more on the topic, LexisNexis has made available a white paper and accompanying infographic titled “Leveraging Market Intelligence to Better Manage Supply Chain Risk.

The presenter, Eric Walsworth, LexisNexis’ Director of Supply Management, illustrated each of his points about risk management by drawing comparisons to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. I won’t embarrass myself by trying to recreate any of that – if you’re interested in the soccer angle you’ll have to watch the webinar on demand.

Walsworth took a need – risk management - that is overwhelming for many procurement teams and broke it down into very clear phases and efforts. Although each of these elements is important to a supply risk management effort, they must all work together in order to be effective. Additionally, although the following seem to be a linear process, they must all be executed in parallel.

The February ISM-New York Report on Business was released on March 3rd at 9:45am Eastern and is available for download here. Please see the end of this commentary for additional information about the ...

This week’s Wiki-Wednesday topic is financial statement analysis, and hopefully you’ll believe me when I say that if I can get comfortable with this, ANYONE else can too. Financial statements are not always easy to read, but with risk management and new supplier identification on the docket, the time has come for all of us to get used to doing it.

This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is an excerpt from th Wikipedi page on Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician that taught post WWII Japan to manage quality, but wasn't discovered in the U.S. until the very end of his career. Not many business strategies would survive that kind of test of time, but his does.

Last week I attended an excellent supply chain risk management webinar sponsored by the Next Level Purchasing Association and featuring a global supply chain manager from a Fortune 500 company. The event followed the story of this particular corporate supply chain through the 2010 tsunami in Japan (you can click here for my notes).

One of the lessons this particular company learned was about finding the right place for addressing the human side of a very complicated business issue. I was impressed with the efforts they had made, particularly for such a large company. A thought started to form in my mind: what contract clauses were put aside in order to have an appropriate response to the devastation while not creating serious business continuity issues?

This week, Procurement Leaders’ Data, Intelligence, and Technology Forum is taking place in London on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you are planning your webinar schedule beyond this week, I recommend ‘Achieving Agility in Procurement Operations: Beam’s Transformation Journey’ from ISM, Scout RFP, and Beam Suntory on December 11th.

A quick note as the end of the year approaches: I’m watching the event listings for December, and as of right now it looks like December 10-14 will be the last week of the year. If the week after fills in, I’m game, but if it doesn’t, I’ll stop my event recommendations posts on December 17th and pick up again on January 7th.

BTW: If you haven’t already, sign up for our mailing list to be sure you get my weekly recommendations in your Inbox each Monday.