Description
From over 30 years of experience working with companies like yours, Creating and Maintaining Resilient Supply Chains helps you to:
- Understand the criticality of procurement and supply chain management to the health of your organization.
- Relate the time-tested principles of good business continuity planning to constructing a reliable supply chain.
- Apply risk management principles to evaluate vendors and create effective contracts.
- Create the specifications that will result in a good tender or bid.
- Anticipate contract issues when you are dealing with other legal systems, including International Commercial Law, Anglo Saxon Law, Civil Code, Sharia Code, and European Law.
In one short book, Hiles distills the knowledge of a lifetime to prepare you to handle risks, pitfalls, and potential ambiguities. As a result, you will know how to carefully plan and negotiate supply chain relationships that benefit all the organizations involved.
Part 1: Understanding Resilient Supply Chains
While many BCPs deal with physical incidents, you may face situations in which all your physical assets remain intact – and yet you still lose your operational capability. Perhaps the most common cause of these incidents is supply chain failure.
BC Managers need to work together with their colleagues in procurement departments to ensure continuity of mission-critical supplies and services. Even when supply is maintained, price shocks could impact an organization’s competitiveness severely – or even its viability.
This chapter will help you to:
- Relate your role as a BCM to supply chain continuity.
- Appreciate the criticality of procurement and supply chain management to your organization.
- Understand the basics of procurement including the procurement cycle and associated procedures.
- See how the supply chain works.
- Know the importance of strategic procurement.
- Identify key risks – and some solutions – in procurement, supply chain, and contract management.
Part 2: Contracting for Resilient Supply Chains
Essential to the operation of the supply chain are tenders and contracts. Briefly, an invitation to tender (ITT) is a formal invitation giving suppliers the details of what the buyer needs in order to choose a supplier. For this process to take place, the buyer outlines all the specifications that will allow the supplier to offer a tender or bid on the project. Once a tender or bid has been accepted, a contract, or legally binding agreement, will follow, ensuring that the winning bidder will perform as specified. We will begin by discussing in detail the requirements of a carefully constructed tender and then, at the end of this section, address legal and content issues for an effective contract.