Is Your Supply Chain Dangerously Lean?

The presentation addresses a high-risk factor for manufacturers in today’s lean, global economy: failure of a single supplier in a complex supply chain or web of supply chains. Disruptions happen every day, and the bigger your supply chain the more likely you are to be impacted. To mitigate the risk, it is important to predict potential disruptions and assess the flexibility of your chain, plan to mandate business continuity planning of critical suppliers and prepare to respond, manage and recover from disruptions, such as with team exercises to improve existing plans and perform when interruptions occur. Presented at: AeroDef Manufacturing 2013 Conference and Exposition, SME, March 19–21, 2013, Long Beach, CA.