Creating Resilient Supply Chains: Is Yours Too Lean for the Next Disaster?

In his recent blog post Bend Don't Break: The Resilient Supply Chain, Peter Krensky, an Aberdeen ERP research associate, pointed out that natural disasters are an unfortunate reality - one that the world community has had to face with unsettling frequency in recent years. The fear of a catastrophic event affecting business can keep any executive awake at night, writes Krensky, and the response to these events is completely disruptive to the business and often very costly.

Unfortunately, the "quality and timeliness of the response can also make or break reputations in the market and are often determined simply by facility locations or suppliers' locations." Having a "resilient supply chain" in place to mitigate these risks and dampen the effect of these catastrophic events is a subject that is top of mind for all executives across all industries.

Aberdeen Group's recent report, CSCO View of Resilient Supply Chains by Bryan Ball, vice president, principal analyst, examines the strategies and capabilities supply chain executives can employ to weather the storms that all supply chains face. According to Ball, the report looks closely at the concept of a resilient supply chain and defines what it really takes to be able to say, "We have a resilient supply chain."

In an interview with MSDynamicsWorld.com, Ball pointed to recent catastrophes like the tsunami in Japan and the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland as key wake-up calls for companies that weren't previously thinking about supply chain contingency plans. "A lot of companies had leaned out their supply chains to the point where everything was demand-pull," Ball explains. "The buffers were eliminated and everything was as tight ...