The Business Continuity Institute has published a new report into supply chain resilience that finds that 73 percent of organizations recorded at least one supply chain disruption in 2011.

The report summarizes the key outcomes of the BCI’s 4th Annual Supply Chain Resilience Survey. 532 from across 68 countries and 14 different industry sectors responded to the survey, which was supported by the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply, Zurich Insurance Group and DHL Supply Chain.

The survey concludes that effectively managing supply chain continuity is critical not just because of the immediate costs of disruption, but also the longer term consequences to stakeholder confidence and reputation that may arise following a supply chain failure.

Further findings include:

• The leading cause of supply chain disruption is unplanned IT or telecom outages with 52 percent of organizations surveyed experiencing some or high impact disruption as a result, followed in second place by adverse weather, experienced by 48 percent of respondents;
• Currency volatility rises to fourth place in this survey of disruption. While not traditionally seen as a business continuity area, it shows that the business continuity thinking can be more widely applied;
• Disruption is also becoming more consequential – financial costs are higher than in 2011 with one in five companies registering a single incident loss of more than €1 million;
• The UK leads the USA in considering supply chain disruption within continuity programmes with 75 percent doing so in the UK compared to only 44 percent of US-based respondents.

The report is available for free download at http://www.thebci.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=341&Itemid=201.