According to a study by the Business Continuity Institute, a disruption to the supply chain leads to production downtime in 55 percent of the companies surveyed, to additional costs in 46 percent and to customer complaints in 43 percent. The same applies here: Time is money. The faster a company reacts to disruptions, the lower the subsequent costs.

The follow-up costs can be enormous, as the survey shows. As many as 14% of respondents estimated that the financial follow-up costs of the most significant single incident in the last 12 months amounted to more than EUR 10 million. 9 percent estimated the costs of the most significant individual loss to be more than EUR 100 million.

As a result, a system that provides immediate information about company-relevant disruptions in the supply chain offers a major competitive advantage. Due to the current possibilities of digitalization technology, a risk management system that provides real-time information about relevant, business-critical supply chain disruptions can be implemented with little effort. From a compliance perspective, it is also advisable to use the technical possibilities of digitalization in risk management rather than sticking with traditional solutions.

Factors influencing the supply chain
The supply chain is influenced by many macro and micro factors. Macro factors include climate change, digitalization, globalization, the global demand for sustainable business practices and an increasing number of norms and standards that require company management to implement a comprehensive risk management system (e.g. ISO 9001: 2015).

Micro factors that affect the supply chain include the geographical concentration of service provision, the complexity of partners, products and purchasing groups. In addition, there is the optimization of working capital (just-in-sequence/time, outsourcing, etc.) in connection with the shareholders' return expectations.

A modern supply chain risk management system (SCRMS) must enable a company to map these macro and micro factors according to their relevance and react quickly or faster than the competition to disruptions in the end-to-end supply chain. This is possible if the relevant information and risks are available in real time.

Monitor information sources in real time
This real-time monitoring uses all data sources available worldwide. This means that both structured information sources such as expert databases and unstructured information sources such as Internet publications or Twitter messages are monitored. This information must be selected according to relevance and harmonized and prepared in an interpretable, structured format so that it is then available to employees on their mobile devices. The corresponding software solution must be intuitive to use.