Is your supply chain resilient enough to survive unprecedented times? A question many of us have learnt the answer to in the last few months with the outbreak of COVID-19. But with the pandemic far from over, what can you do now to make it stronger and rebuild its foundations more securely?
In episode 13 of Talent Talks, Martin Smith welcomes Nick Wildgoose, Director of Procurement Advantage. Nick has an impressive career working with brands such as PwC, Virgin and Zurich, before becoming a well-known leader in supply chain resilience through his own procurement consultancy.
They discuss the assessment of geopolitical, financial and technological risk, the development of digitalisation and why being second in supply chain isn’t good enough
This episode of Talent Talks covers:
- Building a resilient supply chain
- Embedding risk management within the sourcing process
- Ethical sourcing
- Understanding your full bill of materials
- Effects on different industries
- Digitalization and big data in supply chain
- Enhancing mapping capability
Links & References:
- Talent Drive: https://talentdrive.co.uk/
- Martin Smith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinsmith2009/
- Get in touch: info@talentdrive.co.uk
- Nick Wildgoose: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-wildgoose
- Contact: nick.wildgoose@procurementadvantage.co.uk
- Procurement Advantage: https://www.linkedin.com/company/procurementadvantage/
- Procurement Advantage Website: https://www.procurementadvantage.co.uk/
- Specialist supply chain resilience services: https://www.supplien.com/
- Useful online training certificate developed by the Institute of Risk Management: https://www.theirm.org/qualifications/supply-chain-risk-management-certificate/
Episode Highlights:
“Supply Chain Resilience” is the supply chain’s ability to predict and take proactive actions to avoid or be prepared for unexpected risk, events, avoiding or responding and recovering quickly to potential disruptions to return either to the original state, or grow by moving to a new or more desirable state to obviously maintain customer service, market share and financial performance.” – Nick Wildgoose
“I would say the key message for procurement professionals out there is to be comprehensive about their risk assessment. And what do I mean by that is, let’s assess the number of the risk areas. So we talked about financial, but what about geopolitical risks? We’ve seen, unfortunately, not just with COVID-19, but dare I say the tweets of certain world leaders and trade barriers literally changing the world overnight. Despite that, you know that the dependency we have on certain large countries, China and India in particular for say, API’s (active pharmaceutical ingredients) so it’s also understanding where your concentration of risk is in that mapping exercise. ” – Nick Wildgoose
“So this was a story coming into COVID-19 – one of those companies that had mapped out his critical supply chain. So it knew it was getting a key part from Wuhan, in China from a tier two supplier. It obviously in early January, heard about the issues that it was starting to happen in Wuhan. So it took a decision then to buy forward four months of inventory that it required and to ship it out of China during January before the lockdown. So it was sat in in a European country with four months of inventory to cover them during the COVID-19.” – Nick Wildgoose
“I want to make the point that technology and big data is now available, I would say, at a cost effective point, you know, the benefits far outweigh the cost now of buying that top technology as software as a service. And so what I mean by that is you can relatively rapidly and cost effectively now map out those supply chains we talked about throughout the tiers, you can discover where they are, and then quite quickly overlay some of these risk areas, for example, nap cat exposure.” – Nick Wildgoose
