European Leaders In Procurement Blog

As recent ELP coverage has suggested, ‘risk’ is probably the hottest topic so far in 2007. The expansion of outsourcing in an increasingly global marketplace, alongside a marked rise in the number of natural and unnatural disasters - think Hurricane Katrina and further destabilising conflicts in the Middle-East – has left many procurement and supply chain managers understandably nervous.

Supply chain risk is rarely out of the headlines and the dangers are there for all to see. You only have to look at the recent example of three former employees at an outsourcing centre in India who, through ‘encouraging’ customers to reveal their pin numbers over the phone allegedly managed to milk Citibank customers to the tune of approximately $350,000.

Back in May 2006, Dr. Christopher Jahns, writing in Issue 5 of the ELP Magazine pointed to the rise in the number of recalled cars as evidence of a growing number of quality problems connected with increasingly global supply-chains. "Increasingly serious and threatening risks are obvious at various points of the supply chain,” he warned, before adding: “…there is a gap in adequate supply risk management strategies capable of coping with them.”

So with risk showing no sign of disappearing off the radar, ELP, in association with BrainNet, are launching a new Europe-wide survey examining the role of risk management in procurement.

The survey will cover six major topics;

Section 1: General questions on your procurement organisation.
Section 2: Risk management strategies.
Section 3: Sourcing governance and compliance.
Section 4: Supplier risk.
Section 5: Price changes and financial hedging.
Section 6: Best cost country sourcing / global sourcing.

The data will form an evaluation report, which will provide you and your companies an invaluable insight into the kind of strategies being adopted across the continent in an attempt to combat procurement risk. We hope you find it interesting.