On Thursday, March 26, Cathy Allen (Founder and Chairman, Santa Fe Group), Atul Vashistha (Chairman and CEO, Supply Wisdom), Mike Jordan (Vice President of Research, Shared Assessments) joined in a discussion moderated by David Perez (CEO, Shared Assessments/The Santa Fe Group) on how resilient organizations prepare for and weather business disruptions such as the current pandemic. 

Organizations and industries have adjusted to move forward through these challenging times. We have seen extraordinary creativity across industries as organizations rise to meet rapidly unfolding changes and new constraints. Technological adjustments include increased use of robots across the supply chain. Remote work has revealed new flexibilities in how we interact, how we hold meetings, how we get work done. Organizations have been willing to help one another with resources that share of methods and approaches to handling contemporary constraints as we all do our part to move an economy forward.

The webinar’s hopeful tone of resilience was tempered with the realistic need for organizations to adjust towards a future where disruptions of greater severity are on the rise.

The webinar called on the third party risk community to take stock of these key questions:

1. What actions are we taking today?
2. What will we act on as soon as this pandemic is over?
3. What sourcing strategies do we need to reconsider?
4. What technological operations do we need to reconsider?
5. What changes about our business moving forward?
   

Today’s pandemic points to the need for organizations to establish risk operations centers equipped to handle both daily operational risks and issues brought to the forefront by this moment such as:

• Location Issues from both a workforce and materials perspective (essential services have a definition that differs country by country and this has given rise to stress on the supply chain)
• Technological Issues including availability, capacity and, in some cases, location of key equipment
• Financial Issues including the financial health of your third parties

Merely managing third parties is not enough. Early warning capabilities and continuous alerts monitoring for the issues above are key as organizations ready their response to deal with disruptions arising on an ongoing basis. 

Supply Wisdom has made real-time and continuous alerts free to all organizations.