Over the past decade organizations have faced relentless customer demand for better value at less cost, individual customization, greater choice, faster delivery, higher quality, exceptional service, and more recently — increased environmental and social consciousness. The organization's weapon of choice to address this increasing demand has been the supply chain. However, as the supply chain footprint changed (e.g. outsourcing, off-shoring, and customer/vendor empowerment) so did the organization's exposure to uncertainty.

Organizations were taken by surprise since this exposure was unanticipated, complex, and beyond their ability to manage. As customers become more demanding and change occurs at an even greater pace, supply chain risk continues to propagate like a parasite. Organizations and societies are at much greater risk of systemic failure because of the massive interdependency throughout global supply chains.

The priority now is two-fold: play catch-up and address these massive gaps while deploying more intelligent and integrated strategies (i.e. socially aware, instinctive, dynamic, and predictive) for dealing with continuous change.

Single Point of Failure: The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management, authored by Gary Lynch, Marsh Risk Consulting's Global Practice Leader for Supply Chain Risk Management, uses analogies and dozens of case histories across a wide range of industries to describe the risk parasite that infects all supply chains while revealing methods to neutralize that parasite. The book addresses the questions:

• What are the "single points of failure"?
• How exposed are customers, investors, other stakeholders, and ultimately the organization?
• What is the measurable impact (i.e. brand, financial, strategic, and non-compliance)?
• Who establishes the "risk paradigm"?
• How does the organization efficiently and effectively allocate precious resources — time, people, management attention, and capital?
• How is success measured?

Read the table of contents of Single Point of Failure: The 10 Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management. Or read a sample chapter.

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Read Single Point of Failure: The Ten Essential Laws of Supply Chain Risk Management.

Related Information

Risk Issue: Supply Chain

Media Coverage:

  Supply Chain Brain

  SupplyChain Management   Review

Article: Marsh's Gary Lynch talks about how H1N1 can disrupt global supply chains in Supply Chain Management Review