Procurement, in the year 2011, witnessed some of the major challenges, especially from a supply chain perspective. Procurement professionals around the globe were seen fighting supply disruptions emerging out of the adverse events that occurred in 2011 which not only resulted in production losses but also negatively impacted company bottom lines. Based on the impact of these threats, various studies are forecasting a loss of €280 billion for the year 2012.

Effectively managing supply chain continuity is critical not just because of the immediate costs but also long term consequences to stakeholder confidence and reputation that arise from supply disruptions.

The Oilrig Supply Chain

Lora Cecere (Trends I am Watching), highlights two takeaways for supply chain leaders:

The first is redesigning the supply chain to be “resilient” to change; which requires the ability to sense change, have control tower analytics, and “what-if” analysis to understand and respond to change. The second takeaway is to think about where else the disruptions will come from. The Procurement over the years has transformed itself to a more strategic player. The supply chain has never been more politically, environmentally, and obviously economically intertwined.

What 2012 is going to bring forwards is the concept of Big data supply chains, since “data volumes are exploding, data velocity is increasing and data types are proliferating.”

To make 2012 better than 2011, we have to understand all the sources of supply chain risk. We have to learn how to make the supply chain more adaptive and agile, more efficient and resilient by understanding the role of procurement technologies.

http://blog.kinaxis.com

http://www.zycus.com/resource-centre/supply-chain-risk-lp.html

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