This question shows how important supply chains have become. Many large brand names such as Apple have outsourced nearly all their manufacturing.

Proxima a UK based procurement consultancy found that between 2009 and 2011, 69.9 per cent of revenues from 1,954 global businesses were spent on suppliers, compared to 12.5 per cent on staffing.

Even in Financial Services or Local Government a high percentage of their cost base is in the supply chain (Third Parties) as a result of outsourcing services like IT, call centers and refuse collection.

This question in showing the current level of supply chain disruptions indicates the opportunity to improve business performance by enhancing supply chain resilience.The survey also shows many organisations are suffering numerous events each year.

This can often result in the failure to deliver for the customer on time which is one of the most frequently used key performance indicator across different industry sectors.

This question serves to illustrate the substantial economic losses that can occur across a supply chain. In the case of the Thailand floods several industry sectors were impacted, in particular, the electronics and automotive sectors.

These impacts can be felt across the globe, with for example production lines in the US impacted by Thailand floods. These effects continue for some time after the flood events. In this case a few organisations had not fully recovered even 12 months later.

This answer illustrates that in order to operate successfully several networks or chains need to be coordinated appropriately.

For example, a modern warehouse cannot operate without the information that is provided by the computerised system to enable goods to be tracked and shipped. Additionally, if the funds related to the supply chain transactions do not flow then this can also cause disruption.

Supply chains create substantial financial flows between countries and organisations. It has been found that some of these funds are supporting armed conflicts. This has led to the development of several pieces of legislation.

In 2010, the U.S. Congress passed a landmark law. The “conflict minerals” provision—commonly known as Section 1502 of the Dodd Frank Act. It requires U.S. publicly-listed companies to check their supply chains for tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold, if they might originate in Congo or its neighbours, take steps to address any risks they find, and to report on their efforts every year to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The EU is also progressing similar legislation that will come into effect in 2021.

Systemic risk refers to the risk of a breakdown of an entire system rather than simply the failure of individual parts.

In a supply chain context, if denotes the risk of a cascading failure in supply chains, caused by linkages within the economic system, resulting in a widespread disruption. A key question is always how to limit the build-up of systemic risk and contain crises events when they do happen.