Supply-Chain Risk for a Manufacturing Group

The challenge

A multi-plant manufacturing group depended on hundreds of suppliers for components, IT services and logistics, yet had no single view of the risk they introduced. Assessments, where they existed, were one-off questionnaires filed away.

After a few incidents involving external partners, management wanted to know which suppliers were genuinely critical, how exposed they were, and how to notice a deterioration in time.

My approach

I built a supplier inventory and ranked it by criticality, combining business impact with the level of access to the group’s data and systems. A small set of third parties emerged as deserving priority attention.

For the critical suppliers I paired document-based assessment with evidence from the outside — exposed surface, basic hygiene, signs of compromise — so that what they declared could be compared with what was observable.

Risk fed into a single view for management, with thresholds and a periodic review process. The most critical suppliers were placed under continuous monitoring, with alerts when their risk profile shifts.

The group moved from sporadic assessments to a repeatable third-party risk programme, with clear priorities and a shared basis for contractual decisions.