A survey on risk-management and tooling support for procurement processes in supply chains

Managing risks in supply chains is challenging for most companies given that the globalisation process is strengthening production constraints and also introducing more procurements risks. This is difficult for smaller companies in particular as they lack the resources necessary to develop specific expertise or buy expensive tools. Our research aims to address these issues by proposing an easy to use, yet powerful, tool-supported methodology. As a first step, we conducted a survey of the relevant industries, which were mostly based in Germany and Belgium. The goal of the survey was to assess the current state of risk management practices and identify the associated requirements specific to our SME target. This paper presents the outcomes of our survey based on the results collected from a representative sample of 70 participating companies. These results yield interesting observations regarding the characterisation of the people in charge of risk management, their perception of the importance of risk categories, the current ways to manage these risks and the tooling used. We also collected several recommendations for how tools could better support risk assessment and drive the rest of our research.