DHL has bolstered its supply chain risk management offering, Resilience360, and warned that some sectors of the economy are lagging behind when managing risk exposure.
Tobias Larsson, Head of DHL Resilience Team, explained that managing risk has not been given the same priority as managing costs in many cases, leading to unnecessary exposure. “There are different levels of maturity in different sectors when it comes to supply chain risk management. Businesses focus on A, B and C costs. A is the labour, B is transport and C is the cost of risk – the cost of something failing. While most businesses have focused on the A and B costs, risk has been ignored to a degree.”
While the automotive sector is held up as an example of one that is carefully and effectively managing risks, engineering, manufacturing, retail are lagging behind, possibly because they have traditionally held more stock locally in order to mitigate against issues.
DHL’s Resilience360 works by taking in a business’ supply chain data in order to build a model showing risk exposure to natural disaster and geo-political events. It will also monitor events and issue alerts, and can be integrated into transport management systems.
Since its launch last year, Resilience360 has been used by customers across Asia, Europe and the Americas, DHL has said. The largest uptake has been in the automotive industry, followed closely by the chemicals, life sciences and technology sectors.
The new enhancements will now allow customers to visualise the route of their supply chain by integrating Resilience360 with their Transport Management System. Customers can then scan the latest position and status of all their shipments worldwide. This will make it easier for customers to correlate shipments with disruptive incidents and identify potentially affected areas that require corrective actions.
More details are available via a DHL whitepaper called ‘Next-gen LLP: Driving new business value in an unpredictable world’, written by Lisa Harrington, President of lharrington group LLC. It can be found here.
