We asked two senior risk professionals: what are the biggest concerns in your supply chain?

“I’m concerned about companies not having visibility over their supply chains.

“I find it intriguing that many companies continue into the unknown without having visibility over key areas such as country of origin, shipment/delivery accuracy, physical security, internal processes & social and environmental accountabilities/ responsibilities.

“I think there is a dichotomy between strategy and operation and we need to stop treating [the] symptoms and instead get to the root cause. As an in-house risk manager for two decades, I find that many companies [don’t] see the forest for the trees, treating operational risks and symptoms instead of strategic risks and the root cause in their supply chain risk management.

“The key [to overcoming this] is to align strategy with risk management by establishing governance, leadership and management in the supply chain with a robust risk assessment regime to treat the root cause and mitigate risk in an accurate and timely manner.

”The culture of resisting change and maintaining the status quo would be the biggest challenge [to mitigating this]. It is dangerous when we allow apathy and complacency to grow in the organisation and when we assure ourselves that we are ‘good’.

“Recently the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants (ISCA) and KPMG conducted a study, supported by the Singapore Exchange (SGX), which showed that ‘many firms sought only to comply with rules but might not see benefits of practice’. KPMG added that ‘we need to see more improvement on the behavioural aspects – the part about people, about the tone of the [risk] culture, and the rationale of why a company should care about risk governance’.”

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“Our organisation and the products we produce are dependent on machinery. As such, the associated risks or factors that could curtail or hinder the machinery and equipment from operating at an optimum level is our single biggest concern.

“This risk is strongly linked to other risks. One of these is the disruption to electrical supply. Another is the breakdown of machinery and the time required in getting machines up and running again.

“To manage the risk of electric outages, we have generators that automatically kick in within seconds once there is an outage. We also have regular preventative maintenance scheduled in, which is part of our internal supply chain processes.

“Our supply chain department carries out business continuity planning exercises with simulation scenarios or desktop scenarios. The idea is to go through the thinking process, determine the ‘gap’ rectification required, and work towards addressing the ‘gap’ as part of working towards readiness if a similar situation occurs.

“More training is needed, however, to build up technical staff capability and robust processes built through understanding supply chain and forecasting and to understand the other bottlenecks.

“In managing the risks, it is important for me to understand the risk appetite of the organisation in relation to its business model, strategy and its business execution and, accordingly, from here the need to map all relevant risks that could lead to undesired risk appetite – and to best disseminate them by cascading them to the relevant risk owners and following up, to see how they could effectively manage this with the organisation’s risk appetite with necessary actions.”