Two recent news articles highlight the increased risks.

As the world has become ever more interconnected, and as information expands and moves at the speed of light onto our desktops, social issues can be just as important as traditional supply chain issues.

Today, when threats to your supply chain may arrive via an act of God, or appear in an exploding flurry of Twitter messages, it is important to plan for disruption and to have the tools in place to develop low-cost strategies for dealing with disruption.

The starting point for managing supply chain risk is to design a supply chain that has alternative ways of operating when disrupted.

To approach this problem, need to build a model of your supply chain that includes capacities, costs, revenues.

A Gartner report on how CISCO manages risk noted “Transparency is critical to both internal and external support for supply chain resiliency. Objective metrics contribute to transparency.” In other words, supply chain risk scenario analysis should be sufficiently robust to model a good number of alternatives, to know what is feasible and what is infeasible, and to be able to present metrics on the cost to “de-risk” the possible disruptions.

An excellent tool is to start with learning basics