Supply Chain Risk Management Providers – The Right Selection is a Must

Supply chain risk management is no doubt necessary in procurement organisations, but here’s the reality: Not all of your procurement teams and specialists will have enough time to examine all aspects of their company’s supply chain—particularly the n-tier suppliers. In most cases, they will only be able to examine their critical suppliers and may overlook other elements that can cause problems to the supply chain of an organisation. For this reason, hiring supply chain risk management providers is recommended. With supply chain risk management specialists, your business should be able to achieve deeper visibility into its extended supply chain to identify risk and key performance indicators, which must be monitored to avoid any surprises.

Selecting supply chain risk management providers should be done carefully to ensure that you are hiring the right professionals. To get started, determine and understand your needs and the current risks in your supply chain, then look up a reputable provider of supply chain risk management solutions that follows a systematic approach in addressing the risks using a proven process. Consider a provider that maps and identifies interdependencies in your extended supply chain by collecting information on your critical suppliers and analysing the information to determine how dependent they are on one another.

Seasoned supply chain risk management providers are capable of mapping potential risk areas by conducting research on countries and markets that can have a significant impact on your n-tier suppliers in every procurement category. Likewise, they identify risk indicators, which must be monitored for every category. Monitoring the risk indicators and spotting risk signals are crucial steps in proper supply chain risk management. You can leave those tasks to experienced providers who use a reliable category intelligence framework to keep tabs on risk indicators linked to your procurement categories. You will be provided with updates in the form of periodic newsletters, news alerts, and reports, so you can always be informed on any potential risk that can come from your extended supply chain.

Financial Services Research Trends In 2017 – What to Look For

Custom financial research continues to thrive across asset classes, geographies, and sectors to meet economic, industry, thematic, and company research needs of different investors. Even organisations with their own research teams engage financial research service providers for support, especially when it comes to keeping themselves updated with the latest financial services research trends. Now more than ever, financial services research matters—especially amid the changes occurring in the financial sector of many countries, including the UK.

One of the major trends in financial services research for 2017 is concerned with processing and handling large amounts of data. It is now essential for sell-side researchers or IRPs, investment bankers, private equity partners, investment advisors, and asset managers to have access to financial research providers who can assist them and their in-house researchers. Research providers can manage data-intensive and repetitive tasks. The same experts can cost-effectively and flexibly handle peak-load situations, too, so you can focus on generating revenue and ideas, portfolio optimisation, and client management, and increase the profitability and quality of your financial research.

With regards to changes in buyer behaviour, financial services research is expected to make an impact on investment management in 2017, especially since millennials are joining in the investing marketplace. Securities and exchange authorities have increased regulations and recommended the use of automation and other technologies that can make investment management easier for firms.

Financial services research can make it easier for investment advisors, asset managers, private equity partners, and investment bankers to efficiently provide their services to new investors. Service providers can help them identify emerging acquisition targets and investment themes, and provide support for time-sensitive deals. Likewise, they can reduce the likelihood of information overload, and provide assistance in controlling research costs by boosting the capabilities of in-house research teams.

Reshape and Refresh Your Supply Chain with Supplier Sustainability Management Solutions

These days, supply chain sustainability is not only dependent on reputational factors, but also the financial aspects that may affect your suppliers. The latest GRI G4 guidelines emphasised the growing focus on supply chain performance reporting, too, making it more essential for chief procurement officers in your organisation to ensure and maintain a proactive approach in that direction. Procurement organisations typically issue sustainable procurement guidelines, enlisting expectations they have on suppliers based on common parameters for sustainability to serve as a screener when choosing and before taking in a supplier. However, to ensure sustainable procurement, your organisation must do more than that and focus on a more in-depth assessment of every supplier. This is where a supplier sustainability management solution can help.

Effective supplier sustainability management encourages thorough and constant assessments on suppliers. Likewise, it encourages organisations to engage suppliers on sustainability issues that may affect the way they run their business and deal with the organisation. That way, suppliers can continuously improve their performance and develop better relationships with your business. Procurement intelligence analysts and specialists follow a comprehensive framework to assess the sustainability of suppliers across geographies and industries. This way, you can have a supplier sustainability management solution that can effectively refresh and reshape your supply chain and how you deal with your supplier.

A good sustainability assessment framework should check the supplier’s compliance with standards and regulations related to governance, social, and environmental parameters. It uses best-in-class approach to determine the efficacy of policies, initiatives, and strategies your suppliers are taking to enhance their sustainability objectives. For that to work, a supplier sustainability management solution must be tailored to the procurement system of your organisation. That way, you can rely on custom sustainability assessment reports that can help you uncover the critical areas where a supplier may need to improve.

3 Services from Your Supply Chain Consultant That Can Help Streamline Your Business

As your business learns the importance of shifting from cost to value, it becomes more vital than ever to have actionable intelligence on your supply chains, procurement categories, and suppliers. Hiring an experienced and skilled supply chain consultant can help streamline your business in many ways. With their help, you can make informed decisions to improve your manner of planning and acting proactively. Here are three crucial services that a supply chain consultant can provide to enable proactive procurement:

1. Supply chain risk management – Risks in the supply chain can come from critical suppliers and the extended or n-tier suppliers. Hence, it is important for your business to be able to see through every aspect of the supply chain and be able to identify risk and performance indicators to avoid surprises. Supply chain risk management can increase your visibility into your extended supply chain through ongoing monitoring of critical suppliers and supply chain mapping. The supply chain consultant can continuously monitor key risk indicators in your supply chain, too. That way, any risk indicator can easily be spotted and resolved before it causes further problems.

2. Supplier risk assessment – Critical suppliers must be monitored and assessed thoroughly based on factors like their financial health, sustainability, and the status of their business. A supply chain consultant can conduct the assessment on your behalf, while performing on-going market intelligence to uncover any risk, which your critical suppliers may be exposed to.

3. Sourcing intelligence – The supply chain consultant can provide in-depth analytical insights and intelligence to help you develop tactical and strategic sourcing requirements, which are crucial for reducing the costs of sourcing. It should help you minimise sourcing time, boost negotiation intelligence, and broaden your portfolio of suppliers, too.