Leveraging a Tailorable Holistic Perspective of Supply Chain Risk
One of the main elements required to achieve SoT ’ s goal is consistency – whether that be consistency of :
• A specific organization ’ s assessments over time and across their different groups that are doing evaluations ,
• Across the various members of a supply chain as they each perform their due diligence in assessing their own suppliers , and the supplies and services they get from them ; or
• Across an industry that has similar concerns and constraints .
Providing a path towards achieving differing types of consistency will require engagement and participation from all parts of our collective marketplace . There is business value in understanding the expectations and needs of your customers and having consistent expectations across industry sectors . This identified value offers a strong incentive for businesses as does having colleges and universities educate the future work force and leaders about supply chain risks in a manner that prepares graduates for varied career paths and professional endeavors .
Having an explicit methodology for scoring the individual risks , especially one that is supported by evidence , is a critical part of the System of Trust capability . This includes addressing how risk assessment findings are collected and can reflect incomplete data or missing information . Additionally , it must allow for reflection of the risk tolerance or sensitivity of an assessing organization to the different risk areas .
For example , foreign ownership of an entity can be a deal-breaker for some organizations in government but less of a concern for those in industry ( unless of course that entity plans to supply those that have those concerns ). For some types of transactions an organization may be highly concerned with whether a supplier ’ s infrastructure is located in an area susceptible to weather or political events . The significance of these risks must be tailorable to reflect an organization ’ s approach to assessing and addressing risks .
A final aspect of the SoT scoring approach is in addressing issues coming from aggregating many individual risk measurements together . There could be strong risk findings in a few items that get diluted by low-risk findings in others . But if strong risk findings point to risks that are critical to the organization then those findings cannot be hidden by a scoring approach that does not account for this use case . We are addressing all of these issues in the SoT scoring approach .
Another dimension of SoT ’ s approach is to establish a broad understanding in the community regarding where information can be found to answer the various questions surrounding supply chain security risks . Some information about specific supply chain risks is readily available from government or other public sources . Examples include public filings , public information on
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