These are the findings in the annual report and EventWatch Top 5 from Resilinc, a cloud provider of supply chain resilience and risk management intelligence and analytics

"This was a good year for supply chain events as there were no severe disruptions on the scale of the 2011 Thailand floods, the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami or 2012's Hurricane Sandy," said Shazaib Khan, Resilinc EventWatch program manager. "It is important to keep in mind, however, that a common misstep that organizations make is placing too much emphasis on planning for the highest impact risks and disaster scenarios. Supply chain impact research indicates that smaller, more frequent disruptions are more costly in aggregate than those precipitated by high-impact, but infrequent events."

Key report highlights include:

• For the second year in a row, factory fires/explosions were the most common supply chain event followed by labor strikes and hurricanes/typhoons.

• The top 3 industries for supply chain events for 2013 and 2014 were automotive, high-tech and life sciences.

• In 2014, the preponderance of supply chain events emanated from North America, followed by RoW [the rest of the world] and Europe. 2014 was a less “eventful” year for Asia for which only 111 events were reported compared to 125 in 2013.

• The combined number of events rated severe and high in potential disruption impact was up 12 percent in 2014 compared to 2013. However, the number of severe events was down 41 percent year over year.

Resilinc cautions that even apparently low-impact events need to be further assessed after initial detection and analysis, and this can divert resources and bandwidth from critical cost savings, supplier development, and other strategic initiatives. As a result, it is critical to have the real-time event intelligence, filtering, and analytics that minimize the time spent on analysis and the time required to determine an appropriate response.

Source: Resilinc