THE SUPPLY CHAIN IN BRIEF
THE LAST
MILE
Contingency Planning: When supply chain disaster strikes, will you be prepared?
It’s 9 a.m. Your phone rings.
A customer service representative from your Chinese component supplier shares bad news: a fire has caused considerable damage at its main plant, and it has temporarily shut down production. Your contract man- ufacturers have quotas to fill and deadlines to meet, and depend on a steady supply of that crucial component. A major U.S. retail chain has a standing order for a consid- erable number of units and has invested a lot of money to market and advertise the product to shoppers.
How you spend the next 8 hours depends on whether or not you have a supply chain contingency plan in place. Fortunately, most of you do. Fifty-five percent of industrial buyers surveyed recently by Thomas Industrial Network (see “Numbers for Thought” below) , have already developed a contingency plan–or have begun to create one. Log on to www.inboundlogistics.com/contingency and give us the hourly play-by-play for how you would handle this situation. We’ll publish your answers in an upcoming issue.
NUMBERS FOR THOUGHT: Survey respondents who are developing a supply chain contingency plan identify the following vital components: Identify critical materials
and services and who supplies them: 37 percent
Perform risk assessment of suppliers: 23 percent Build contingency into routine day-to-day operations: 23 percent Set recovery time objectives: 15 percent
256 Inbound Logistics • July 2007
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