How Collaboration Reduces Your Global Supplier Risks

A current example is the congestion that’s been plaguing U.S. West Coast ports for several months resulting in week long shipment delays.

These disruptions can be driven by a variety of events that include labor disputes, Customs delays, natural disasters and other incidents.

Following the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan, supply chains worldwide felt the impact of this natural disaster as Japanese manufactured exports worldwide dropped dramatically.

The lessons to be learned from this natural disaster are still being analyzed by supply chain experts as a means of pre-empting further and future ramifications from such a catastrophe.

Risk comes in many forms and the key to insulating your supply chain against costly delays, or failures, can be found through software solutions and process changes. Instituting a robust collaborative software platform and consolidating data from your external systems results in the ability to buffer your supply chain operations from all major risk factors.

While the examples throughout this whitepaper focus on the Retail industry, the issues, concepts and benefits of a collaborative supplier network apply across industries.