A recent global study by the insurance industry involving over 450 companies across multiple industries found that the average number of supply chain disruptions per 12-month period was 11. These disruptions, costing about $350k each, add up to about $4 million dollars in out-of-pocket expenses every 12 months to mitigate disruptions. Many of these costs may not be covered by insurance. There is no shortage of reasons why supply chain risk management must be taken seriously. The SCRMC is committed to expanding the body of knowledge in supply chain risk & resiliency through university classrooms, publications, books, public workshops, online certification courseware, leading-edge, online assessment tools, solutions, best practices, and best practices accreditation organizations. 

For these reasons and many more, the SCRMC has decided to enhance our existing SCM Tool and build out a Cloud-based Supply Chain Readiness “Primer” Tool to assess

Over the last ten years the tool has provided tremendous value to:

• Over 1,500 MBA students across 15 universities
• Over 3,000 operational and supply chain professionals
• Over 350 financial risk professionals
• And many corporations across almost all industry sectors

The bottom-line value proposition of the tool, through classroom time, workshops and client engagements, has been:

• It establishes an objective AS-IS supply chain process maturity level profile..... Very Mature (1-3), Less Mature (4-8) and Very Immature (8 & Beyond)
• It identifies an initial Risk Assessment Level-set as well....Low (Green Circle), Medium (Orange), High (Red)
• It provides direction for future TO-BE supply chain improvements within the tool &
• It acts as an objective benchmarking vehicle to evaluate mature supply chain/risk improvement projects

To put a bow on the genesis of the original tool, it has been available as a download URL within our best-selling book; “Supply Chain Risk Management: An Emerging Discipline.” Dr. Robert J. Trent and Gregory L Schlegel—CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015

The SCM Assessment Tool is now called—“The SCM Readiness Assessment Tool.” Why?

We’ve ADDED three new tenets to the Tool. They are purely aligned to risk and are black & white. Meaning, there’s not much wiggle room. You either do these or you don’t. They are:

• Intentional Redundancies
• Risk Mitigation Planning &
• Agility

The SCRM Consortium has been helping companies identify, assess, mitigate and manage supply chain risks for over 10 years. With the advent of our new AI/ML driven, online SCR&R 90-Day Assessment/Action Plan Tool, we had an epiphany. What we realized after numerous engagements is---many, many companies want to do something in supply chain risk but are totally unprepared! With that as a backdrop, we’ve upgraded our long-standing, one-dimensional supply chain assessment tool.

Enhanced Capabilities:

• We’ve gathered hundreds of assessments across many industry sectors from the past 10 years.
• We began to categorize the findings by industrial sector and began to review the assessments
• We developed overall definitions for each of the 13 tenets, providing context for each
• We captured trends within industry sectors, such as patterns in terms of strengths, weaknesses, propensities, etc

We’ve Built out a “Likert-type” ordinal numbering approach to profile Best-in-Class levels of supply chain process maturity and levels of inherent risk in those processes, such as High, Medium and Low, using a color-coded Heat Map.

This has led to what we are now calling Tier-1 Supply Chain Management Readiness Assessment Tool. (Figure 3) 

As you can see in Figure 3, the outcome of the 92 questions is still a computer-generated graph depicting a company’s AS-IS position, dark BLACK line, relative to their supply chain process maturity and the inherent risks in each tenet. It continues to display the Best-in-Class area where almost all exemplar supply chain companies reside---the GREEN Exemplar Circle. It continues to provide a TO-BE supply chain roadmap, based on its’ inherent maturity model structure. And it still acts as a benchmarking tool to graphically demonstrate supply chain process improvements over time. This particular graph profiles one of two SCM Readiness Assessment Tools now available. It’s a manufacturing-centric assessment and our 2nd SCM Readiness Assessment Tool covers service-oriented supply chains along with NGO’s in Public Healthcare. 

The online assessment comprises 100 questions culminating in providing Your Team: 

1. AS-IS Process Maturity State relative to Best-in-Class Maturity
2. AS-IS Process Maturity State relative to your Industry
3. Your Company's strengths within your SC relative to Strategic, Tactical and Operational Levels
4. Your Company’s Executive Team Importance and Satisfaction Ranking of Your SC Processes
5. Overview of the SCM Acceleration Improvement Playbook to drive Fast-Tracked Time-to-Value.