Regular Supply Chain Audits Recommended, But Value of Some Assessments May Be Questionable

For one thing, an expanding list of risks means there are more things to audit. Inevitably, at large companies a lot of stuff falls through the cracks - that is, if those companies bother doing meaningful audits at all.

For another, new kinds of risks are cropping up that may escape auditors' notice. Traditional supply-chain risks include demand and supply variability, limits on capacity, and quality issues. But those have been joined in recent years by such considerations as greater customer expectations; ever-increasing global competition; longer and more complex supply chains; increased product variety with shorter lifecycles; and security, political and currency risks.

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