The BCI Supply Chain Resilience Report has become an invaluable source of information for both resilience and supply chain professionals over the last few years. The release of the 2017 report this week brings the picture right up to date.
In many ways this year’s report confirms the patterns seen in previous years: 65% of respondent organisations experienced one or more supply chain disruptions in the last 12 months (compared to 70% in 2016); and the eight of the top ten causes of disruption from 2016 featured in this year’s top ten, with IT/telecoms outages and cyber attack/data breach featuring as the top two causes again. However, buried in the detail of the report there is a striking and alarming change from last year.
In last year’s report 9% of organisations reported that a single supply chain incident had cost them more than €1m, but this year that proportion jumped to 23%. Even more alarmingly 14% of organisations report that a single incident cost them more than €10m (3% in 2016) and 9% report that a single incident cost them more than €100m (0 in 2016). Can there really have been this huge growth in extreme supply chain incidents globally; or is this increase driven, for example, by a small number of respondents severely impacted by the recent string of hurricanes in the US?