Sep 25, 2006 1
Supply Chain Meets Risk Analysis
In today’s business world, managing the risk that businesses are exposed to on a daily basis is getting the much needed buzz – it’s called supply chain security sometimes and supply chain risk. An article in InformationWeek.com – Supply Chain meets Risk Analysis, highlights one such adoption of risk management techniques for a real world supply chain.
Elena Malykhina is the author of the piece,
Wall Street’s hedging and risk-management techniques now can be applied to help manufacturers optimize capacity and sourcing decisions. Vivecon Corp. last week added two applications to its Supply Chain Risk Management suite: Strategic Component Supply Manager, which quantifies risks and helps manufacturers develop hedges against unpredictable swings in demand, and Tooling and Capacity Manager, which assesses likely demand for a product and monitors market acceptance.
As you can observe in that lead, supply chain security, demand uncertainty (which btw has long been a mainstay of the industrial world) and capacity planning all fall under the purview of supply chain risk – risk management, to be more precise. So is this merely a rehash of a long set of outstanding demands that supply chain practitioners have been looking for a long time.
“We are the poster child for demand uncertainty,” says Chuck VanDam, supply-chain engineering manager at Agilent. “It’s a natural thing for us to be interested in supply-chain risk and flexibility management.”