(Publisher’s note: Our challenge to each reader is to pick and view one great Supply Chain Management/Supply Risk Management session today.)

Our inaugural CPO Rising 2K20 Virtual Series brought more than 2000 procurement, finance, and HR professionals together around the topics that matter to business leaders right now (i.e. how to ensure continuity, build resilience, and prepare for the recovery). These webinars (or sessions) are available On-Demand through the end of May (click to view or simply read below).

With more than 20 hours of great presentations from leading Chief Procurement Officers and other global experts, the series is a great resource for CPOs as well as procurement and other business leaders. To make it easier to find the session (or sessions) that best apply to your role/team/employer, we’ve organized them into four different tracks with unique job roles in mind. We continue today with a discussion of the Supply Chain Management & Supply Risk Management Track.

Supply Chain Management/Supply Risk Management (Track 2)

This track consists of four presentations from Procurement, Sourcing, and Supply Chain experts analyzing the global supply chain and providing insight into how to rethink, recraft, and ultimately improve it going forward. These on-demand sessions are ideal for sourcing and supply chain leaders as well as category managers and those interested in global sourcing.

A New World (of) Orders: Rethinking the Global Supply Chain (starring Gregg Brandyberry)

As a leading procurement executive (CPO) in the pharmaceutical industry, Gregg Brandyberry led the charge on global sourcing into China and India in the 1990s and early 2000s. In this presentation, Brandyberry looks at how today’s global supply chains has developed in the aftermath of this first wave of activity, and the problems that they face today given the coronavirus pandemic. He also looks at what and how companies should be thinking about their supply chains given the current disruption and uncertainty that pervades the market. This presentation is ideal for Sourcing and Supply Chain leaders as well as any procurement and P2P staffers that interact with international suppliers in any way, shape or form. Among Gregg’s many insights:

“What has to change really critical items around health and safety? The U.S. (and the world) will need to reduce the reliance on low-cost goods and materials from the far east, institute heightened supply chain security designed to protect consumers and businesses, and drive more simplicity into overly complex supply chains… for these materials, we need a ‘Manhattan Project’ type of approach”

“I’ve seen organizations where the complexity of their supply chain is greater than their ability to monitor and protect it. It’s really important to drive more simplicity where we can into overly complex Supply Chains.”

“Advanced manufacturing technologies will help the US make up ground against China and other countries… While a new look at low cost sources of US labor is needed… This can lead to more regionalized supply chains with multiple sources of supply availability.”

“As a function, procurement needs to Act now, Be bold, Create much better and secure supply chains, and De-couple from the old ways of thinking.”

Agile Sourcing via Intelligent Automation (with Alan Holland & David Siedt)

Alan Holland and David Siedt from Keelvar discuss how we can bring to bear speed and best practices to the sourcing of a wide-range of categories. The duo examine how sourcing optimization can impact the speed and responsiveness of a sourcing team and also how sourcing bots can address changes faster than can be done by humans. Some of the key insights from the session include:

“Many sourcing challenges that companies face today existed before the COVID-19 pandemic – capacity limitations, supplier limitations, supplier shutdowns, freight expense volatility that can be addressed by sourcing optimization.”

“If you are evaluating any sourcing optimization solution, you want to make sure it has these four components – (1) Flexible bid inputs (2) Systematic traffic light bid feedback (3) Point & click scenario analysis and (4) Easy to use and adopt by suppliers and buyers.”

“With sourcing automation and bots, sourcing teams can take the higher frequency, ad hoc categories and speed up the sourcing with less team involvement.” 

“What you really want to do as a sourcing function is to collect information from your suppliers in structured form so that you can apply machine learning protocols to continuously improve your strategy, the types of suppliers you should be learning, and what works best over time.”

The Role of Sustainability in the Post-COVID-19 Supply Chain (starring Divya Demato)

Sustainability is the cornerstone of resilience! In this session hear Divya Demato, CEO & Co-founder of the GoodOps, a renowned expert in sustainable supply chain management, as she presents a series of new considerations and new options that are available to supply management leaders as they re-craft their supply chains in a “post-COVID-19” world. Key insights from this session include:

“Nearly 75 % of companies report supply chain disruptions in some capacity due to coronavirus-related transportation restrictions, and more than 80 % believe that their organization will experience some impact because of COVID-19 disruptions.”

“The path to resilience will be hard won. Companies must be strategic in their response and recovery efforts to ensure successful restoration and reinforcement of their brands.”

“While the primary goal is near-term survival, signals sent during crisis endure.”

“To future-proof supply networks from another reality-altering event, companies must build a business continuity plan centered on stabilizing the people and resources in their supply chain.”

Provenance Management: Protecting Your Supply Chain from Counterfeits (with Daniel Stanton, Mark Manning)

Daniel Stanton is a supply chain executive, educator, and entrepreneur, and is currently the President at SecureMarking, which has developed a highly secure technology for parts authentication. Mark Manning, the Founder and CEO of iTRACE Technologies, a Silicon Valley company that specializes in supply chain security. For the last 15 years Manning has been involved with brand protection and product security and has delivered technology solutions to supply chain’s biggest problems. In this session you’ll hear these two supply chain experts discuss the key strategies to help prevent supply chain piracy. They both share insights including:

“The reality is that for those working in procurement and supply chain, the risks are both numerous and specific.”

“What is causing the ballooning of counterfeit products? You can’t put all of the blame onto the supplier. The problem lies with the brand. Blaming or trusting the supplier too much is not working to find a solution.”

“A company fighting counterfeit problems is really a supply chain problem. The only way for a company to get its arms around the problem is to engage the entire supply chain from source to return with an integrated provenance strategy.”

“At the end of the day, you can’t really engineer and manage a supply chain if you don’t understand where the products are coming from and how they are flowing the whole way through.”

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Watch one of the sessions above – bet you can’t watch just one!!

The CPO Rising 2K20 Virtual Series Sessions – CPO and Procurement Leadership Track

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