Leveraging Technology to Mitigate Risk: Part II

One area of risk that may not be easily recognized is supply chain staffing and background checks, says Deborah Wilson, a supply chain risk management analyst with Gartner. She notes that personnel-tracking functionality for contingent workers sourced through staffing agencies and business process outsource providers can be vulnerable to all kinds of mishaps.

SAP Fieldglass and IQNavigator address these concerns, according to Wilson.

Through its cloud-based vendor management system (VMS), SAP Fieldglass can offer companies a way to view their entire workforces “holistically,” enabling them to make strategic hiring decisions across all its workers.

According to Ardent Partners, a research and advisory firm focused on defining and advancing the supply management strategies, VMS solutions are the true “nexus” of contingent workforce management.

“More than 400 global businesses leverage our industry-leading technology to gain visibility into their external labor, project-based services including Statements of Work, independent contractors and additional flexible talent pools, says Fieldglass’s Arun Srinivasan, senior vice president of Strategy and Customer Operations .

Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA)—another workforce risk consultancy—also gives high marks to IQNavigator, noting that its apps deliver SaaS solutions to enterprises in 125 countries across all four regions and is the only independent “pure play” provider of talent management software.

Unfortunately, due to the diverse requirements involved in assessing, tracking and mitigating the various risk types, Gartner does not anticipate a rise of general-purpose supply risk dashboard technology that can cheaply consolidate and centralize supply risk data for the larger manufacturer or brand owner…at least not over the next five years.

“Instead, cross-functional supply risk councils will be forced to manually coordinate and facilitate a high-level, holistic view for the organization across multiple solutions,” maintains Wilson.

Indeed, most analysts we spoke with agree that supply chain risk management will also be especially attractive to segmented markets. The thinking behind this is that only some suppliers with ample budgets will warrant deep analysis and detailed, ongoing risk tracking. Many analysts also question why logistics managers would even make risk assessments based on “one size fits all,” when less costly app alternatives are in such abundance.

“For example, evidence of insurance may be critical for service suppliers that are on-site on an ongoing basis, whereas insurance may not be as important for a vendor that performs work virtually,” observes Wilson.

The conclusions regarding technology-based innovations in cloud delivery algorithmics (which is the science of algorithms) and big data are that they will significantly improve the impact and effectiveness of supply risk solution deployment. Getting to “board room” approval for investing more in apps addressing current and anticipated threats may not be such a hard sell for logistics managers in the long run.