Assessments Objective

Created by Amit Kadam, Modified on Thu, 28 Aug at 2:18 PM by Amit Kadam

Historically, supply chain organizations have known knew where their suppliers were located, but over the years the interdependence within suppliers has increased and the complexity of supply chains in terms of sub-tier visibility has increased exponentially. This is where things get complicated, most companies today tend to have a fairly good idea about where the Tier-1 suppliers are located - roughly 75% visibility. However, that only poses a 5-20% percent risk, and as companies dig deeper into the supply chain at tier-2, tier-3, and beyond, visibility declines, and companies start to see bottlenecks.

Due to the globalization of supply chain organizations, it is imperative for businesses to get deeper visibility into supplier networks to understand the dependencies on sub-tier suppliers & their global locations. Lack of visibility makes it very difficult to react swiftly, avoid downtime and overall impacts on the business. There are disruptive events occurring around the world which pose a constant threat to supply chains, and if companies are unaware of their supplier network the time to discover the impact and react can be extremely costly.

Assessments are surveys that can be sent out to a customer’s suppliers to be able to “assess” their multi-tier visibility, business continuity, disaster management etc. They allow customers to make response and recovery related decisions proactively, thereby minimizing impact. There are some prominent and recommended assessments that customers typically use, such as Supply Chain Visibility (SCV) and Business Continuity Plans (BCP). Assessments can also be customized according to the organizational objectives from the Supply Chain Risk Management program.

This comprehensive document on assessments has the following agenda:

To describe how a user can create or customize assessment as per their SCRM requirements.
How to launch an assessment to suppliers and then track assessments with the assistance of a customer success representative.
To understand what the benefits are of having ‘Supplier Success’ support in scope for making the most of assessments.
To learn about Supply Chain Visibility, Business Continuity Plan and Custom assessments, its pre-requisites, and the processes in detail.
To understand some best practices which customers can implement to get the best output from each assessment they launch.