As businesses increasingly rely on external parties for critical services, they become more vulnerable to business interruptions. This is especially true when such businesses know little about their third-party vendors' resiliency and recovery capabilities, according to PwC US, which examined the effects that vendor resiliency, or lack thereof, can have on an organization's business continuity strategy.
The rise of global sourcing as a means to minimize costs has had the unintended consequence of increasing risk. Dependence on an increasing number of suppliers makes it difficult to monitor their performance without automated metrics. According to a 2013 Supply Chain Resilience Survey, 75 percent of organizations experienced at least one supply chain disruption incident in the past year.
What are the biggest challenges facing the global apparel supply chain in 2014? One that stands out is the pressure to deliver on the omnichannel promise. There's a fundamental disconnect between the demands of an omni-channel retail environment working to give consumers immediate results, and an apparel supply chain that is getting longer, more fragmented and more difficult to predict.
Today's complex and connected supply chain translates into quick communication with partners. At the same time, it creates huge opportunity for data leakage and security issues that need to be addressed proactively in supply chain systems.
Harvard University's FXB Center for Health and Human Rights contradicts claims that slavery and child labor have been eliminated from the hand-made carpet industry in India.
As companies go global in their operations, they need new solutions for managing risk that can traverse countries and link in thousands of worldwide suppliers. Cloud is coming to the rescue where internal systems can't. Here are three cloud supply chain niche solutions that are gaining traction, and why.
Here's the latest advice for supply-chain managers: Sweat the small stuff. Manufacturing company executives responsible for parts and supplies tend to worry most about what would happen if deliveries from one of their biggest suppliers were disrupted by a natural disaster or other unforeseen event, says David Simchi-Levi, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A federal border patrol initiative sparked by 9/11 terrorism may lead to an automotive industry breakthrough in mapping its complex supply chain. The Automotive Industry Action Group of suburban Detroit is launching a new Web-based database for identifying the physical movement of finished goods, parts and materials through the automotive supply chain.
