Shared Assessments’ latest TPRM professional resource, Effective TPRM Foundations: Building Business Continuity and Operational Resilience to Strengthen Supply Chains, provides strategies for leveraging operational resilience and business continuity planning to build supply chain resilience. The resource underscores how quantifiable metrics such as KPIs and KRIs help organizations to measure performance, streamline reporting, and anticipate risk.

Organizations typically depend on a tiered network of vendors, often extending beyond third party to Nth-party relationships to sustain their operations. To prudently manage the supply chain, organizations must effectively manage the vendor lifecycle, including:

• Establishing onboarding processes that align new vendors with the organization’s risk management expectations and foster a shared operating vision.
• Implementing enforceable contracts that set standards, hold suppliers accountable, and close accountability gaps.
• Evaluating critical supplier business continuity management (BCM) and disaster recovery (DR) plans to assess risk.
• Conducting operational resilience testing across the supply chain to assess supplier readiness and identify weaknesses.
• Implementing ongoing monitoring of the supply chain to quickly identify and respond to disruptions.
• Executing structured offboarding practices to safeguard organizational assets and sensitive information.

Effective supply chain resilience also requires strong, proactive communication and partnerships with vendors. By systematically measuring supplier performance and monitoring risks through metrics, organizations can identify gaps, monitor risk mitigation efforts, and align vendor operations with objectives. Additionally, these metrics facilitate clear reporting and collaboration across stakeholders. This paper provides examples of KPIs and KRIs, providing a foundation for organizations to develop metrics tailored to their specific needs.

This resource, the fourth in the Shared Assessments Global TPRM Practices Committee’s 2024 paper series, represents the work of the project team of SMEs who stepped forward to update this guide. The best practice solutions that have evolved over the past two decades are brought together and refined by the Global TPRM Best Practices Committee, that is open to members and non-members and currently has more than 260 registered individuals from 185 organizations spanning 15 time zones. If you would like to join, we’d love to have you. You can learn about our other committees at https://sharedassessments.org/committees/.

The full paper and Practitioner Guide are available for download here.