Next episode of our series: Supply Chain Risk Management done right!

Here is the part nobody puts in a framework document. It is also THE part that determines whether everything else works.  I have seen it in multiple organizations across different industries. A buyer spots a worrying signal from a supplier. They are not sure it is serious enough to escalate. They do not want to be seen as alarmist.  They wait:  Three weeks later, it becomes a crisis.

The process existed. The governance existed. The risk register existed. But the culture did not support early escalation. Nor was there any trust (remember my post 2 weeks ago?). And that made all the difference.

Risk culture is not a values poster on the wall. It comes down to one question:  „In your organization, what actually happens when someone flags a risk early?“
If the answer involves extra meetings, justification overhead, or quiet skepticism, you have a culture and trust problem, not a process problem.

Building a genuine risk culture means a few concrete things:
  Leadership visibly rewards early flagging, even when the risk does not materialize
  Leadership walks the talk and integrates managing risk into discussions, decisions, and processes – and they listen whenever they are asked to listen!
  Near-misses are reviewed without blame, not swept under the rug
  Risk is a normal topic in S&OP and supplier reviews, not a special escalation
  Cross-functional teams share ownership, so procurement is not carrying it alone
  Roles, responsibilities, and incentives get adjusted. Protecting the organization, its assets, and earnings becomes everyone’s responsibility by default.

My takeaway after years of building and leading supply chain risk organizations:
Culture is not just an enabler. It is THE enabler for managing supply chain risk organizations effectively.
Yes, culture change is slow. Process change is fast. Most organizations default to the fast option. And then they wonder why the processes never quite stick.
If you ignore building and maintaining a risk culture, you are going nowhere, wasting budget and time, and frustrating your entire organization!

This isn’t from a textbook or study; it is the experience of a practitioner who learned it the hard way.

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I’m speaking at Risk Awareness Week 2026 – the largest virtual conference on risk-based decision-making (12–16 October). My sessions:
When Supply Chains Break: How the Best Companies Decide Under Uncertainty (30 min talk)
Building an Effective Supply Chain Risk Management Capability (3h Workshop)

If you haven’t come across RAW, it’s been running every October since 2019 and has reached more than 22,000 professionals from over 140 countries. In 2024, FERMA named it Training and Education Program of the Year. The conference’s central theme is that risk management is not about risks; it’s about decisions.

The program focuses on practitioners showing how to put credible estimates on uncertainty and use them where decisions are actually made: budgets, forecasts, projects, insurance. My sessions are part of a full week of talks and hands-on workshops running 12–16 October, entirely online – sessions are broadcast at scheduled times and available as replays afterward, so any time zone works.

I am happy to add the wisdom of 18 years of Supply Chain Risk Management, including 15 global, award-winning SCRM implementations across numerous industries. As usual, hands-on with practical solutions and a focus on what’s really needed to increase speed, save budget, and be effective from day 1.

The first two days of the conference are free to attend. You can register and see the full program here: https://www.riskawarenessweek.com/

The post Speaker Alert: RISK AWARENESS WEEK 2026 appeared first on targetP.

Most companies manage supply chain risk backward. They respond to events.

THE MORE EFFECTIVE WAY: They should be reading signals. There is a world of difference between the two. An event is when your supplier calls to say they cannot deliver. A signal is the pattern that predicted the call weeks or months earlier.

In my 18 years of building SCRM systems across industries, the same warning signs appear before almost every supplier failure:

 Payment delays to their own sub-suppliers

 Supplier asking for early payments

 Unexplained and frequent management changes

 Declining quality or rising non-conformance numbers without a clear root cause

 Layoffs, high fluctuation, and strikes

 Shipment and capacity excuses that keep shifting

 Audit requests are being postponed again and again

None of these alone is a crisis. Together, they are a pattern. Patterns are readable if you know what to look for.

The problem is not that signals are invisible. It is that most organizations have never defined what a signal means for their specific supply base, and nobody is systematically looking for them.

Technology might help with signal identification and pattern analysis, and so will educated, aware employees.

Here is a simple starting point: Take your ten most critical suppliers. Do you have a defined set of early-warning indicators you actively monitor regularly? If not, that is exactly where your SCRM journey should begin. Next question you should ask: What signals have you seen precede a supplier failure?

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Hi. I am Jan, your SCRM Builder. Not a consultant who theorizes about risk. A procurement leader & risk practitioner who has built 15 SCRM programs globally, trained 1,200 people, and led procurement and risk organizations through crisis. I share what works and help you build an effective SCRM. I work globally.

The post Your Suppliers Are Sending You Warning Signs. Are You Reading Them appeared first on targetP.

Risk Management is all about

staying in business.

remaining solvent.

continuing to provide work, income, and stability to the people who depend on the organization, whatever its size or legal form.

And preparedness is not a luxury reserved for those who can afford a risk department. It is a basic act of responsibility toward your employees, your shareholders, your customers and, ultimately, yourself. It is your job, 365/24/7!

THE factor that decides whether that responsibility actually works in practice:

TRUST

If you asked me which single factor has the greatest influence on whether risk management actually works, my answer is always the same: TRUST.

Trust is the willingness to make yourself vulnerable to another party, expecting them to act with goodwill, competence, and integrity, even without a contract forcing them to. That is exactly what risk management tries to enable: cooperation under uncertainty and in crisis.

In calm times, trust is an efficiency factor. In a crisis, it is a survival factor. I once worked through a fire at one of our most critical suppliers. The potential damage ran into the hundreds of millions. The technical response worked exactly as designed. But something else changed the outcome. We sent senior leadership to the site immediately, not to make demands or cite contracts, but to ask what the supplier actually needed, and to rearrange our own production to relieve pressure on them. When production restarted, that supplier prioritized us. Not because we demanded it. Because they wanted to. Only a real relationship could produce that outcome.

What you should do:

Build trust before you need it. Crisis is the wrong moment to start. Follow contracts, solve issues in partnership, help out in a crisis. Easy & no money required.

Reward early, honest signals from your own people and your suppliers instead of punishing them for raising concerns.

Stand up for your partners when things go wrong

Stay critical even in long, comfortable relationships. Familiarity should never replace attention.

Trust can take years to grow, and it can be damaged within weeks if behavior is inconsistent. Trust is about building the conditions for honest, early, useful information to reach the people who need it, inside your organization and across your supply base.

Ask yourself: Where does trust sit in your risk management approach today?

Hi. I am Jan, your SCRM Builder. Not a consultant who theorizes about risk. A procurement leader & risk practitioner who has built 15 SCRM programs globally, trained 1,200 people, and led procurement and risk organizations through crisis. I share what works and help you build an effective SCRM. I work and train globally.

The post Trust is not a Soft Skill appeared first on targetP.

A cyberattack doesn’t ask whether you are a DAX corporation or a 12-person family business. A key supplier insolvency doesn’t care whether you are privately owned, government-owned, or publicly listed. A flooded port, a sanctioned trade route: none of it checks your balance sheet first.

SUPPLY CHAIN RISK IS AGNOSTIC

It applies to multinational corporates with risk departments. It applies to the SME with one overworked person doing purchasing, finance, and risk at the same time. It applies to municipal utilities, hospitals, NGOs. None of these organizations are exempt simply because of their size, ownership structure, or sector. What differs is not whether risk will arrive.

What differs is whether anyone is prepared. Risk is not asking whether you are in metal forming or pharmaceutical. It is not asking if you are a small or medium enterprise. I have worked inside large corporates with mature SCRM functions, and I have advised smaller, privately owned businesses with no formal risk process at all. The companies that struggled most were not always the smallest or the least sophisticated. They were the ones who quietly believed disruption happened only to other organizations.

It never is!!!

At the end of all the frameworks, governance models and digital monitoring tools, there is one plain truth that applies equally to all:

This is about staying in business.

About remaining solvent.

About continuing to provide work, income and stability to the people who depend on the organization, whatever its size or legal form.

Whether you are an SME or a global corporation makes no difference. Preparation and investment are required either way; a big budget proves nothing about effectiveness, and there is no excuse for inaction or for hiding behind the excuse that this is only for „the big ones.”

Preparedness is not a luxury reserved for those who can afford a risk department.

It is a basic act of responsibility toward your employees, your shareholders, your customers and, ultimately, yourself. If you run an organization of any kind, the question is not whether risk will find you. The question is whether you will be ready when it does.

I am Jan, your SCRM Builder. Not a consultant who theorizes about risk. A procurement leader & risk practitioner who has built 15 SCRM programs globally, trained 1,200+ people, and led procurement and risk organizations through crisis. I share what works and help you build an effective SCRM. I work and train globally

The post SUPPLY CHAIN RISK IS AGNOSTIC appeared first on targetP.

A Supply Chain Risk or a cyberattack does not ask whether you are a NASDAQ/DAX corporation or a 12-person family business. A key supplier insolvency does not care if you are privately owned, government-owned, or publicly listed. A flooded port, a sanctioned trade route: none of it checks your balance sheet first.

RISK IS AGNOSTIC

Just watch the news: It applies to multinational corporates with big risk departments. It applies to the SME with one overworked person handling sourcing, finance, and risk simultaneously. It applies to municipal utilities, hospitals, NGOs. It even applies to the freelancer whose entire business depends on a few clients. None of these organizations are exempt simply because of their size, ownership structure, or sector. What differs is not whether risk will arrive. What differs is whether anyone is prepared for it.

I have worked inside large corporates with mature SCRM functions, and I have advised smaller, privately owned businesses with no formal risk process at all. The companies that struggled most were not always the smallest or the least sophisticated. They were the ones who quietly believed that disruption was something that happened to other organizations. At the end of all the frameworks, governance models and digital monitoring tools, there is one plain truth that applies equally to all:

This is about staying in business. About remaining solvent. About continuing to provide work, income, and stability to the people who depend on the organization, regardless of its size or legal form. Whether you are an SME or a global corporation makes no difference. Preparation and investment are required either way; a big budget proves nothing about effectiveness, and there is no excuse for inaction or for hiding behind the excuse that this is only for „the big ones.” Preparedness is not a luxury reserved for those who can afford a risk department. It is a basic act of responsibility toward your employees, your shareholders, your customers, and, ultimately, yourself.

If you run an organization of any kind, the question is not whether risk will find you. The question is whether you will be ready when it does.

Hi. I am Jan, your SCRM Builder. Not a consultant who theorizes about risk. A procurement leader & risk practitioner who has built 15 SCRM programs globally, trained 1,200 people, and led procurement and risk organizations through crisis. I share what actually works and build your effective SCRM. I work and train globally

The post Supply Chain Risk Is Agnostic appeared first on targetP.

KI-Agenten laufen nicht? Probleme bei Lieferkettentransparenz? Datenprojekte dauern Monate?

Das muss nicht sein. In den letzten Beiträgen haben wir gezeigt, warum saubere Stammdaten im Einkauf die Grundlage sind für:

erfolgreiche KI-Initiativen

resiliente Lieferketten

Transparenz & belastbare Entscheidungen

Jetzt geht es um den nächsten Schritt. Vom Erkennen zum Handeln. Stammdaten im Einkauf ist aktuell Priorität in vielen Unternehmen

Mit Match & Clean verfolgen wir einen pragmatischen Ansatz. Schnelle Ergebnisse statt langwieriger Projekte. So starten wir gemeinsam:

1⃣ Erstgespräch zu Ihren Herausforderungen

2⃣ Demo auf Basis Ihrer Stammdaten

3⃣ Analyse, Bereinigung und Aufbereitung

4⃣ Gemeinsame Bewertung der Ergebnisse

5⃣ Integration in Ihr ERP, TMS oder als Standalone-Lösung

Hinter Match&Clean steht eine praxiserprobte SaaS-Lösung, die bereits erfolgreich im Supply-Chain-Umfeld eingesetzt wird. Sie standardisiert, bereinigt und ergänzt Lieferanten- und Lokationsdaten KI-gestützt und schafft damit die Grundlage für belastbare Prozesse, transparente Lieferketten und erfolgreiche Automatisierung.

Mehrwert sehen Sie nicht erst nach Monaten, sondern bereits nach den ersten Analysen.

Welches Potenzial steckt in Ihren Lieferanten- und Lokationsdaten?

Sprechen Sie uns an. Gerne zeigen wir Ihnen anhand Ihrer eigenen Daten, wie sich Transparenz, Datenqualität und Automatisierung messbar verbessern lassen

targetP evolving procurement. Über 30 digitale Einkaufsprojekte und gebündelt mehr als 80 Jahre Einkaufserfahrung sprechen für sich. Wir machen Lieferketten widerstandsfähig, schaffen KI-Grundlagen und steigern den Ergebnisbeitrag.

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Procurement and supply chain are not exempt from the AI cost shock. Procurement is about cost management, and rising AI costs need to be professionally managed, too. Urgently!

Most loud AI billing comes from software engineering. It is tempting for procurement leaders to assume this is someone else’s problem. It is not.

The upside is real. Walmart’s work with the negotiation platform Pactum, as reported in a 2022 Harvard Business Review article and since expanded, is one of the better verified examples in procurement. Walmart used an AI chatbot to negotiate terms with tail-end suppliers, the long list too numerous for human buyers to handle individually. In the original Canadian pilot, the system closed agreements with 64 percent of the 100 suppliers invited, against a 20 percent target, and extended payment terms by 35 days. As the program expanded to the US, Chile, and South Africa, the close rate reached 68 percent. That is agentic AI doing in days what human buyers could not do at all. And costs have increased.

The risk side deserves equal attention. In January 2026, supplier data firm Apexanalytix published a report titled Procurement AI has a Hallucination Problem.

Its argument: most procurement organizations run AI on supplier data that is fragmented, duplicated, and often outdated. When AI reasons over records like this, it infers and guesses rather than stopping to ask. The output looks confident. It is not necessarily correct, and you paid lots of money for no or poor results!

That matters more in procurement than most back-office work. A sourcing agent recommending a supplier from stale financial data, or an onboarding agent approving a vendor against an outdated sanctions list, can create exposure that surfaces months later in a stockout or compliance finding.

Deloitte’s 2025 Global CPO Survey found 94 percent of procurement executives use generative AI weekly. Separate tracking puts real, governed, full-scale deployment at closer to 4 percent.

That gap is where the token bill and data risk first surface.

Do:

set a hard usage cap before the first agent goes live.

Clean supplier data first. Start with contained, low-risk spend.

Measure cost per task from week one.

Scope context deliberately. Keep a human in the loop for payment or contract terms.

Do not:

roll out agentic AI tenant-wide before a contained pilot.

Let leaderboards reward token volume over correct outcomes.

Point a frontier model at routine tasks a cheap model handles.

Trust a recommendation without checking the data behind it.

Assume a falling token price means a falling bill.

It’s about time that procurement organizations ramp up capabilities to manage AI costs and contracts. It’s a totally different animal than buying SaaS solutions

targetP evolving procurement. More than 35 digitalization projects in Procurement speak for themselves. So do decades of Procurement experience

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