The supply chain is one of the most important parts of any company’s operations. It’s the comprehensive system of people and entities involved in creating products, getting them to consumers, and ensuring business profitability. When the supply chain falters, entire companies can lose profits, revenue, and even loyal brand advocates.
Unfortunately, various factors can influence the performance of your supply chain, from socio-political issues, economic changes, and unpredictable weather. Dangerous driving behavior can put your products and assets at risk.
Even cybersecurity threats can impact supply chain operations, and harm your business reputation. The question is, how do you preserve the security and safety of your supply chain?
Conduct a Supply Chain Risk Assessment
Any business that relies on a supply chain is vulnerable to various sources of disruption. While you might not be able to prevent all potential issues entirely, having a clear view of your risk landscape can help you implement protective measures. Start by mapping your supply chain, looking at the vendors you work with, the routes they use for transportation, and the technologies they use.
Which countries do you navigate throughout your supply chain, and what risks are associated with those locations? What kind of processes do your supply chain partners use that may present a threat to you and your customers? Don’t forget to consider your own security landscape too.
Which software and hardware solutions do you use to protect yourself against threats? Which systems have potential vulnerabilities that could be influenced by external factors or attackers?
Update Your Data Management Strategy
While there are more risks to supply chain security and safety than just those related to cyber protection, digital attacks are becoming more common. If you’re working with third parties, or managing your entire logistics strategy in house, it’s important to have the right methods in place to protect your data.
When conducting your risk assessment, consider your data landscape carefully. Use discovery and classification tools to locate files and databases in your organization that hold sensitive information, such as financial data or customer data.
Next, ask yourself which data needs to be protected, who has access to that data, and which security measures are already in place. Once you’ve answered these questions, look for ways to strengthen your data management and security strategies. You can immediately mitigate certain vulnerabilities by eliminating default passwords for software and implementing multi-factor authentication.
Establish a Detailed Security Strategy
Using your assessment of all the risks in your supply chain, it’s time to start developing a strategy that will help you to minimize potential threats. Create a document that outlines all the objectives you want to achieve to improve your security situation.
You might need to implement new data encryption standards for the documents you share with your supply chain. You may also need to think about how much access you give members of your supply chain to your software, data, and IP.
Outline all the policies and procedures critical to your business and ensure accountability by assigning specific roles to people in your team, with clear responsibility. Focus on ensuring compliance, not just among your own team members, but with your partners too. Outline exactly what their responsibilities will be when it comes to keeping your business secure.
Communicate with Your Supply Chain Partners
Supply chain security is an ongoing challenge, which makes collaborating and communicating consistently with your partners crucial. Throughout the life of your relationship, work with your partners to track risks, and plan ways of preventing them. If you’re concerned about the safety of your shipments, asking your suppliers to implement an asset tracking system can be extremely useful.
A GPS equipment tracking tool can give you a consolidated view of all the physical assets in your supply chain. You could also use comprehensive fleet management tools alongside your supply chain partners, to maintain a comprehensive overview into routes, vehicle health, employee safety, and countless other factors.
If you don’t own the vehicles in your supply chain yourself, your partners can sometimes give you access to reports and insights from this software.
Develop an Incident Response Plan
No matter how carefully you prepare your company’s supply chain and logistics solutions, attacks will still happen. Eventually, there’s a good chance you’ll face an issue that harms the safety or security of your team, your assets, or your business. That’s why it’s so important to have a plan in place for how you’re going to respond to these issues.
Create a comprehensive incident response plan, which details all the roles people will have in addressing problems and following procedures in the event of an incident. Make sure you have distinct strategies laid out for what to do in the event of damage to products or assets, system shutdowns, data breaches, and more. Test these policies, practice them, and ensure they’re prepared for execution.
Keep Supply Chains Safe and Secure
Securing and protecting your supply chain is a complex process. It requires you to think about everything from the physical safety of your assets and vehicles, to the digital security around your data and intellectual property. While you may never be able to eradicate all threats, following the right strategy for Supply Chain security and safety will help to mitigate disaster, and reduce business disruptions.
Supply Chain Security and Safety article and permission to publish here provided by Drew Allen. Originally written for Supply Chain Game Changer and published on December 21, 2023.
Cover image by Thomas Breher from Pixabay.