• Event Report Building Resilience into your Supply Chain

  • Around 40 supply chain professionals gathered April 22nd to attend the CSCMP Roundtable Event 'Building Resilience into your Supply Chain'. Hosted by the NHTV, an interactive evening unfolded with an interesting agenda where presentations from AEB, EY and Akzo Nobel were combined with great networking. Participants and CSCMP members have received the presentations. In case you were not able to attend, please contact us if you want to receive the presentations.

  • “Getting Ahead of Cybercrime: Information Security in the Supply Chain” - Ad Buckens & Joost Quist – EY

    A national telecom company discovering that its sensitive traffic has been tapped by a secret virus, a famous media brand accusing a rogue state of hacking its company secrets, IS and Anonymous fighting a shadow war in the trenches of the internet…  cybercrime and information security are hot topics in the media these days. 

  • In this very interesting presentation from EY it was explored how to deal with this risk from the perspective of supply chain resilience. The speakers painted a picture of the evolving cybercrime landscape and the different types of digital threats and adversaries. An important piece of advice was given in the sense that “One day, your company too will get hacked and you better prepare for this”. This can be done by evaluating your current industry risk level and ICT setup, identifying the vulnerability of your “Crown Jewels” and establishing a long term strategy and roadmap for a more secure environment. This roadmap should not just take into technology and processes but also the weakest link, people. Luckily, a lot of best practices and technologies are available on the market to help supply chain managers deal with this risk and take complexity out of their hands. The speakers from EY gave some vivid examples of cybercrime cases and shared a fascinating peek into their professional lives as “White Hat Hackers”.

    Lesson learned: as with many other building blocks of supply chain resilience, the first step towards information security lies with awareness and anticipation! 

  • “Taking care of integrity in your supply chain” – Roland van Weelden, Akzo Nobel

    Violation of a trade embargo can lead up to large fines as a case like Fokker Services shows. There are reasons for an embargo and your company has to comply with these rules. This might go as far as parts of the end product produced in a country that has an embargo on the end customer country, while the end producing country does not have an embargo. The end product, due to these parts, cannot be delivered to the end customer.

  • Essential to a company is to be aware of the embargoes that exist and to have correct and complete data on the history of parts and modules in the end product. Another major factor is the interpretation of the legislation. The legal text is not always easy to read and it is not clearly defined what is relevant and what not.  Signalling that there might be a violation should stop the order process and initiate a risk assessment.

    In this very interesting  presentation of Akzo Nobel it was clearly defined what the variables are in running the supply chain from a legislative perspective. Keeping track of new legislation, interpretation of legislation, knowing your product, knowing the relevant authorities and their information requirements are some of the major factors to do trade and minimise the risk of violations.

    Lesson learned: The complexity of legislation is growing. The number of variables to comply with international trade rules in your supply chain and the flexibility of your compliance program towards new legislation are necessities to keep your supply chain resilient.

  • “An introduction to the challenges of export controls and compliance” – Iqubal Pannu, AEB UK

    Following the presentation of AKZO, Iqubal presented what challenges AEB sees within the supply chain and how software can be used to support an effective compliance program. As Akzo Nobel is one of AEB clients, it provided a great opportunity to bridge the link between the the software and real life cases.

  • Compliance is playing by the rules, and these rules are to be viewed on various levels. It entails compliance with legal requirements, compliance with internal company guidelines, compliance with generally accepted ethical standards and compliance with principles of good governance. In addition, it’s a  matter of getting the whole organization involved. In many cases, when asked who is leading the compliance efforts within a company, the export or logistics manager is mentioned. Very often this indicates an immature compliance control, as compliance affects many departments within any company; purchasing, sales, service, development, production, accounting and export to mention a few. Not being in compliance has potential consequences, such as loss of image, penalties, revocation of authorization or even threat to the company’s own existence. Software solutions can enable organizations to effectively cope with these challenges.

    Lesson learned; Staying compliant with all rules and legislation in an international environment is a daunting task. Especially when companies grow or become active in 'high risk' countries, embedding a software solution in your business process might be not a bad idea.