Disruption and business continuity in the Covid-19 era
Recent market needs have shown us that demand surges can cause supply challenges such as in chip crunch for the automotive sector or vaccine production for the pharmaceutical sector. The purpose of business continuity planning is to dampen impact on significant demand surges, or to counter unexpected disruptions. Organizations must not only maintain continuity, but also be able to quickly surge its capacity to be able to support the needs of critical services and resources.
The pandemic has reminded us how organizations from all industries, especially those in essential services, must work in sync to ensure that services, medical supplies, food, and other critical resources, are and remain available to the public during times of crisis. Vertaeon’s latest White Paper takes a detailed look at the current business continuity strategies. It then delves into challenges faced by organizations in effectively implementing these strategies and realizing benefits on-time when a risk event occurs. A key overall challenge for supply chain and operational leaders is how to effectively vet and test these mechanisms over time.
When looking for an example of how critical the value chain risk monitoring can be, nothing is more relevant than the deployment of the global vaccination campaign in today’s Covid-19 crisis. The White Paper discusses two examples in this space: Schott AG as a leading provider of glass vials for Covid-19 vaccine and Emergent BioSolutions with its quality issues leading to loss of millions of vials of the J&J vaccine.
How can organizations prepare? This depends on organizational risk tolerance, on the market segment, and probability/impact of the risk event. It is very clear that having a robust risk management strategy, risk management capabilities and risk mitigation planning can enable the organization to focus on growth and not be bogged down by unexpected volatility.
Vertaeon with our focus in manufacturing sectors, aggregates large-scale global data for various risk categories and applies machine learning to provide ongoing, valuable, risk insights. This synthesized information enables global collaboration among decision makers and prompts immediate action for top risk events. As new risks evolve, so should organizational capabilities in this area to sustain profitability and to build competitive advantage. Contact Us to discuss further about ongoing risk assessment and mitigation planning.
Authors: Edward Chiang, Rekha Menon-Varma & David Chouvelon, Vertaeon LLC