SCRLC NEWSLETTER, Q3

MAY COUNCIL MEETING UPDATE

At the May meeting in Austin, Texas hosted by Applied Materials, some 30 delegates continued the on-going conversation to refine the Council’s mission and strategic direction.

Over the course of the past year, the Council’s mission has been significantly recast. Its original ‘working mission’ focused on the presumed need to develop standards pertaining specifically to supply chain risk management. “Six months ago our thrust was toward establishing a new standard,” observes Cisco’s Lance Solomon.

As members have come to appreciate, the problem with this approach is that Council-endorsed recommendations wouldn’t necessarily be embodied in ultimate agency promulgations. “Even if the SCRLC develops standards,” notes Solomon, “they then go into the ‘black hole’ of standard agencies. They have to go through the draft and ratification processes, each country gets input and then the technical community considers them. The net effect is that when they come out the other end, they could look like something very different from what we intended.”

Ken Konigsmark, Boeing’s Senior Manager of Supply Chain and Aviation Security Compliance, agrees that “we’ve backed off on the standards issue. Instead, given the urgency, our goal is to get the collective knowledge out there to use.”

Consequently, rather than seek to draft standards in broad terms at high levels, the Council now sees its mission as directed to Best Practices. “The shift has been to Best Practices and seeing which Practices align with which standards,” says Solomon. “Thus the goal is to have something that Cisco, for example, can give its supply chain partners in terms of Best Practices expectations.”

With that recalibration, the delegates in Austin continued their journey into Best Practices sharing. Representatives from two members shared their companies’ risk management processes. Themes figuring in these presentations were the need to integrate beyond functional/program silos with other key in-house stakeholders, the importance of going deeper into the supply chain, and the development of meaningful metrics that measure supply chain risk on business impact. In addition, such areas as incident monitoring and notification tools, global communications planning and assessment of supplier financial health were addressed.

Konigsmark offers several examples of where the Council’s focus on best practices will provide companies with useful tools they can use. “How do you know your supply chain in depth? You need visibility into the basics. One approach is using U.S. Custom generated data (ITRAC). The trouble is your looking backward, one quarter behind. Another way is with embedded data systems that track and keep a current on-going record of your supplier base.”

“Another necessary Best Practice is how to identify all the elements you need to consider when evaluating risks to your supply chain. It would be great to have a comprehensive template and then a company could go down the matrix.”

“We have been looking at Best Practices at company level,” observes Lance Solomon. “Now we’ll begin looking at collating practices at the Council level. Our goal is to have a thick 3-ring notebook filled with Best Practices.”

To that end, the delegates outlined a roadmap path to get to Best Practices leading to the October meeting. “We’ll have each track (Preparedness, Continuity, and Recovery Planning; Regulatory & Security; Supply Chain Resiliency; Risk Assessment and Monitoring; Supply Chain Incident Detection and Crisis Management) with its read-outs on what Best Practices look like.”