Now is the time for businesses to overhaul their supply chain compliance strategy. As they head into 2023, organizations should take stock of which supply chain compliance challenges matter most today, as well as which types of practices can help them conquer those challenges.
Let’s walk through the biggest risks that we’re noticing heading into 2023 and what businesses can do about them.
Core Supply Chain Compliance Risks For 2023
There are four overarching types of risks that are likely to shape supply chain compliance challenges for most businesses in the new year.
The Need For Real-Time Visibility
Supply chain visibility, such as through a vulnerability disclosure policy, has always been an important component of supply chain compliance.
Today, however, basic visibility isn’t enough. Businesses need real-time visibility so that they can detect and react to supply chain risks as they appear. As Blume Global notes, “in a volatile market, real-time information is essential…to maneuver through supply chain disruptions.”
To achieve real-time visibility, businesses need automated tools that can detect and evaluate supply chain risks in real time. Running periodic audits or relying on occasional reports for visibility is not enough.
Supply-Wide Communication
Knowing where supply chain risks lie is only the first step toward supply chain compliance. In order to ensure that they can actually respond to those risks, organizations must be able to communicate and collaborate with stakeholders from across the supply chain – including not just their direct vendors, but also fourth-party organizations.
Communication and collaboration are key to ensuring full adherence with supply chain compliance policies across all layers of your supply chain.
Managing Fraud And Insider Threats
Malicious insiders have always posed some risk to supply chains. But we’re now living in the age of the “super malicious insider,” as DTEX puts it. The term refers to malicious insiders who are not just your typical disgruntled employees. Instead, they are people hired to perform activities like espionage or sabotage, and they will take advantage of insider access to carry them out.
This means businesses need to be more vigilant than ever in detecting cyber security threats such as malicious insiders, not just within their own ranks, but also within their supply chains. They need to know whether their vendors and partners take steps to protect against malicious insiders as part of supply chain compliance initiatives.
Executing On Supply Chain Compliance
It’s one thing to have a written supply chain compliance strategy – which many businesses do at this point, given the attention supply chain compliance has received over the past year.
But it’s another to put that strategy into practice. Going forward, organizations will need to ensure that their supply chain compliance rules and policies become more than just words on paper. They need tools that can operationalize and automate those policies across their supply chains.
But That’s Not All. Be On The Lookout For:
Consumer Protection Regulations: The fallout from security or customer service incidents can be devastating for a company’s brand – and critics often don’t know, or care, whether the root cause of the issue was a blunder made by the company itself or by one of its suppliers. That’s why staying on top of supply chain compliance is critical for protecting your brand and public image.
Lack Of Regulatory Inventory: To manage supply chain compliance well, businesses and suppliers need to know which specific regulatory rules they must abide by. But many still lack a “regulatory inventory,” meaning an inventory of applicable regulatory rules and frameworks. Getting these up to scratch in a timely fashion should be at the top of your list.
Lack Of Culture Of Compliance: Compliance officers should be evaluating how well regular employees recognize the importance of supply chain compliance and processes associated with it. But many are not, which makes it difficult to build an organization-wide compliance culture. The results of these types of initiatives are difficult to quantify, but compliance officers should make an effort nonetheless.
No Measurement Of Compliance Effectiveness: You can’t address supply chain compliance risks very well if you don’t measure your effectiveness. Businesses should be systematically tracking compliance incidents and how quickly they respond to them. You don’t want to wait until a major supply chain compliance incident erupts to discover that your compliance strategy is not as effective as you thought it was.
Most of these challenges involve the way businesses approach supply chain compliance internally, as opposed to external risks that complicate supply chain compliance.
Comprehensive, Real-Time Monitoring To Automate Your Supply Chain With Findings
No matter which specific supply chain compliance challenges you face, Findings can help you conquer them in 2023 and beyond. Findings automates supply chain security, and offers the ONLY end-to-end, continuous monitoring across your entire supply chain to ensure you’re fully covered against all manner of risks.
