The Business Continuity Institute (BCI) published their latest Supply Chain Resilience Report earlier this month. Now in its eleventh year, the 2019 report very much confirms the patterns seen in previous years:
- Excluding organisations who were not sure if they had experienced a disruption(!); 67% of respondent organisations experienced one or more supply chain disruptions in the last 12 months, exactly the same as in 2018;
- Financial losses were broadly similar to previous years, with 54% of respondents reporting cumulative losses of under €50 000 but a significant proportion (13%) reporting losses over €1m
- Roughly 50% of disruptions occurred amongst Tier 1 suppliers.
There appears to be one encouraging trend though, in that only 43% of respondents reported having no insurance cover for the financial losses of these supply chain disruption; which is down from 47% in 2018, 51% in 2017 and 57% in 2016. It is also interesting to look at the causes of disruption in the supply chain, with the top 5 from 2018 appearing again in exactly the same order:
- Unplanned IT/telecoms outage (44%);
- Adverse weather (35%);
- Cyber attack/data breach (26%);
- Loss of talent/skills (21%); and
- Transport network disruption (16%).
The persistence of these top 5 causes gives a clear focus on the areas to concentrate on when assessing key suppliers’ resilience.