UK poll: current and future challenges in supply chain risk management

Global trade and supply chain management are complex matters.

Both areas affect all business units of internationally engaged companies, and smooth collaboration between all internal and external parties is required to successfully fulfil the demands of a global customer base, keep a competitive edge in challenging marketplaces, and comply with all applicable regulations by all involved global authorities.

To help better understand the complexity of involved processes, options, and regulatory obligations, AEB is driving various educational initiatives tailored to UK businesses. These include lectures as part of university programmes, research studies in collaboration with educational institutions, white papers by topic specialists, solution webinars by IT specialists, and various events with industry experts focusing on alternating global trade and supply chain topics.

I would like to share some interesting findings from one of our recent events. It took place in October 2015 in Leamington Spa and was held in partnership with the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, CILT(UK). Titled “Shaping up for the future – export control challenges now and beyond”, this event focused on compliance and risk management in global supply chains. The programme featured government officials, consultants, and industry experts and included updates on current legislation, upcoming changes, and the best strategies for successful export control compliance programmes.

Over 50 delegates from different industry sectors attended, including aerospace, automotive, high-tech and electronics, defence, engineering, retail, and logistics. With so much knowledge and different perspectives in one room, we took the opportunity to ask our audience two important questions as part of our workshop sequence and panel discussion: What do you think is the greatest risk in global trade management today? And what do you think is the greatest risk in global trade management in the future?

As it turns out, there are twelve key areas and top rated risks that delegates saw in their current and future global trade management operations. We brought them all together in one comprehensive overview, including the delegates’ assessments on priorities for each area marked as low, medium, or high priority. The delegates’ feedback paints a highly interesting picture that provides impulses and opportunities to benchmark one’s own business challenges against.  

You can find the full results here: http://static.aeb.com/blog/current-and-future-risk-management-challenges.pdf.

Poll results highlights: current risks

The number one risk area in global trade management was “obtaining correct information from suppliers for export control or classification”, followed by “convincing teams to carry out required export control activities”. The third place was a tie between “getting sufficient funding for export control programmes” and “training and maintaining effective compliance programmes”.

Interestingly, all of these risk areas are about export control compliance awareness. It seems compliance managers are still struggling to establish an understanding of the importance, relevance, and consequences of export control compliance, despite the many well-known aspects of global trade security today and global governments’ attempts to combat terrorism.

Poll results highlights: future risks

The top future risk areas named by delegates were, in this order, “unpredictable geopolitical changes”, “ability to adapt IT systems to change” and “succession planning for export control”.

The first risk is quite understandable considering the level of political unrest in the world today. What is more worrying is that businesses are struggling with general modernisations in the area of system landscapes that would help them to respond more quickly to new and constantly changing regulatory requirements. The third risk area is linked to training and further education – clearly, more needs to be done to increase awareness for the importance of compliance programmes.

Market pulse check and what 2016 may bring

It was both interesting and inspiring for us to learn from UK industry representatives, and to find out what they perceive to be their main risks and challenges, now and in the future. How do you feel about the results – are they in line with your identified challenges? I am interested in your view and look forward to your comments.

As an additional benefit for those of you still working on 2016 schedules for their business, the following overview of looming global trade agreements and upcoming global trade deadlines in the first half of 2016 may be useful:

http://scnem.com/a.php?sid=8ody8.29095c,f=5,n=8ody8.29095c,p=1,artref=5435024,l=cjshfj.106tsn8.