Preparing for failure

Looking at the current situation in China and its impact globally made me wonder how many companies are actually preparing for failure of their system or setup?

Nowadays, there's countless standards, certifications and courses you can introduce into your organization to reflect how streamlined your internal processes are, how safe your working floors are or maybe even how sustainable your Business is. All these things combined with international guidelines and very strictly documented processes creates the impression that your business is invulnerable.

However...

Looking at potential threats on your Supply Chain, we can safely conclude that most are very asymmetric, unpredictable and out of your control. One could spend ages on trying to come up with different threats that could destabilize your Supply Chain, making this an impossible task. In the China case, many companies could have reduced their risk by having multiple global production sites instead of only China. This might not have solved all of the issues everyone is currently facing, but would definitely have made it less bad than it is now.

What I think...

Just like investments, it is very important to always spread your risk. There is no way that you can predict exactly what variables like markets or in the Supply Chain case, countries, regions or cultures will do. There is a vast human factor impacting your Supply Chain, making it less predictable what could happen to it. Solid intelligence and actively thinking about possible consequences which could hit your company (not causes as they are to unpredictable) could just make the difference for you. Maybe look into alternative locations for sourcing or ask yourself what you'd do if the factory producing your most popular product stopped production. This all comes down to staying humble about how good or solid your setup is and acknowledging that it will always have some vulnerability.

What Crane does...

To build a not so subtile bridge to what we can do for you in situations like these; our C-View Visibility Platform utilises live information, coming from news items and personnel on the ground to predict where calamities might form. Not only will C-View show you this, but it will notify you upfront on all your shipments in transit towards an impacted geozone by E-mail. There's also the possibility to directly engage your contact person(s) at Crane Worldwide through chat, to further speed up the process. Long story short, C-View will give you the opportunity to switch from damage control, to damage prevention instead.

If you have been hit by the current crisis and wondering what you could have done to prevent it or how you can prevent this from happening in the future, shoot me an E-mail at [email protected] to make a(n) (skype/zoom) appointment so that I can show you a live demo of how we'll make your life easier during the next crisis, because it will come.