Theft, data breaches, safety hazards and other issues in your supply chain can pose a serious threat to the ongoing operations, and the entire future, of your company.

If the quality of the final product or service that you provide is impacted by supply chain issues, or you simply aren’t able to deliver your services at all, you have serious problems.

Not only will it cause an immediate drop in income and effect the financial health of your company but will also seriously harm your reputation in the business world, and amongst your target customers.

If you aren’t able to sufficiently guarantee the safety of your staff who are involved in the supply chain process either, you will also find yourself dealing with a high turnover of employees and find it hard to settle into a productive rhythm.

As a security company Newcastle that specialises in keeping businesses across the North-East protected against crime in all aspects of their operations, the supply chain is something that we pay close attention to in every single risk assessment we perform.

In this article, we are going to examine the ways in which you can secure every single stage of your supply chain, ensuring you are able to deliver the incredibly high standard of final product that your customer has come to expect.

Use multiple suppliers

There is very little that you can do to prevent supplier issues apart from choosing suppliers with a fantastic reputation for consistency over many years in the industry.

Using just one supplier is pretty risky as it means that if they have issues your business has issues as well.

Becoming overly dependent on one single other business is not the way you want to operate so try to locate multiple suppliers in different locations if possible.

This means that if there are issues in a certain part of the country, or world, such as extreme weather, your operations can continue.

Whilst choosing two or more suppliers is a good plan, make sure that the quality of product you receive is just as high from each to prevent a drop in your standards.

Fail to prepare

As with anything security related in business, you should always prepare for the worst, so you have a plan in place no matter what supply chain issues do crop up.

Identify all the potential risks at every stage of the delivery process and put control methods in place to deal with them.

You are looking to build a strong but flexible supply chain that will withstand heavy pressure.

Create a visible supply chain

If all the stages of your supply chain are hidden to you up until final delivery, you are setting yourself up to fail.

You will only find out about problems right at the final moment, giving you no time to prepare and little time to react.

The more time you have in advance the longer you have to find an alternative supplier or to take steps to limit the effect on your operations.