Covid-19: What Have We Learned So Far?

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Know your suppliers, build a continuous monitoring system, and get business continuity plans

Bindiya Vakil, CEO and founder of supply chain risk analysis firm Resilinc, suggested three strategies to mitigate design and supply chain risk to Electronic Products’ (EP’s) Roos. Map the supply chain, put a continuous monitoring system in place to alert when events happen, and get business continuity plans from suppliers.

“The one thing that everybody always realizes during events [coronavirus] like this is they don’t know enough about their suppliers,” said Vakil.  A recent case in point:  the senior leader of Jaguar Land Rover reported that the company didn’t know enough about their suppliers and didn’t have enough visibility into their supply chain.

“This is something companies always realize in hindsight as they’re actively managing events, they don’t know where their suppliers’ manufacturing sites are located, where the parts are stored, and where they are distributed from. These are very basic things that companies have not taken the time to find out,” Vakil said.

It’s not enough to just find locations, it’s also important to have a central place to store the information so it’s readily available.

“Everyone is scrambling and trying to find out information at this moment from suppliers, and it’s already too late. In this particular case [coronavirus] many of them are going through quarantine, so companies are really struggling to get information. What they need to do before any event happens is to have a program in their organization to map their supply chain and inform their experts about where their supply chain mapping data resides, and to train them on how to access it in a bind,” Vakil said.

Read the complete article from AspenCore Global Editorial Team at EETimes>>