Aravo-Sponsored Poll Details the Supplier Risk Concerns of Finance, Procurement, and Risk Executives at More Than 200 Top Companies
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, January 12, 2010 – Aravo, the leading provider of SaaS Supplier Information Management (SIM) software and services, today announced the results of a new supplier risk poll exploring the opinions and concerns of Fortune 1000 executives. While global corporations are focusing on creating collaborative partnerships with suppliers to make supply chains more efficient, the poll indicates that their top concerns include ongoing supplier financial viability, ensuring regulatory compliance, and managing suppliers in emerging markets.
A significant number of those polled (71.4%) expressed that their biggest concern continues to be risk of supplier financial viability. However, despite these concerns, more than half of the financial, procurement and risk executives polled have less than 20% of their supplier base under active risk management.
Companies that participated in the Aravo-sponsored poll are also exploring opportunities to maximize budgets by adding more emerging market suppliers. For instance, Aravo found that 31.2% of those polled are “heavily penetrated in emerging markets” while another 31.2% have “already sourced some suppliers in emerging markets and are looking to expand low-cost country suppliers in 2010.” Not surprisingly, the top concern around suppliers in emerging markets is regulatory compliance (41.7%), followed by the financial viability of these suppliers (33.3%). Only 25% of those polled were concerned about product quality.
The poll was conducted during Aravo’s recent supply chain risk webinar series and via emails to Fortune 1000 risk, finance, procurement, and supply chain executives. More than 200 Fortune 1000 companies responded to the questions. Polling will continue during Aravo’s next webinar on January 27th — Managing Supplier Compliance and Performance Risk: Top Indicators Every Company Should Be Tracking.
“Based on our poll results we see a call to action for global corporations to implement more robust risk management processes to reduce the possibility of supplier failures and supply disruptions, improve supplier performance management, and enhance supplier compliance initiatives,” said Aravo CEO Tim Albinson. “More than half the companies we surveyed are managing 20% or fewer of their suppliers for risk, which is an alarming statistic. Large enterprises today require a comprehensive supplier risk management solution to provide supply chain teams with the data and intelligence required for proactive supplier risk management. As we saw in 2008 and 2009, supplier failures can lead to broader business failures, so this is a critical area for business leaders to get right.”
Aravo Risk – A 360° approach to managing supplier risk
Aravo Risk is the first SaaS supplier risk management solution that takes a holistic, 360-degree supplier lifecycle approach. While other solutions offer single components such as performance ratings, risk analysis, transactional compliance, or third party ratings, Aravo Risk combines all of these components into a comprehensive solution that helps organizations centralize supplier risk management – from new supplier evaluation to everyday transactions to audits and compliance. In addition, Aravo Risk manages risk mitigation efforts and supports corrective action planning by automating business continuity and contingency planning. Users can also combine internally generated supplier information with supplier reported data and a broad set of third party data validation and enrichment services, to provide a comprehensive 360° view of supplier risk.
About Aravo
The world’s best-run businesses utilize Aravo’s Cloud-based Supplier Lifecycle Management solutions and Supplier Risk Services to find and manage trading partner relationships, reduce supply chain risk, ensure global regulatory compliance and lower the cost of managing suppliers by up to 72%. Aravo launched the market’s first SIM/SLM solution in 2004 and has been the leading innovator in the space ever since. Customers such as General Electric, Accenture, and Boston University rely on Aravo to manage information and processes for over 2 million global suppliers. Aravo is based in San Francisco, with offices in Chicago, Dallas, New York, Portland, Monterrey, Mexico and Ahmedabad, India, and is backed by over $50 million in investment from Cisco Systems, Big Sky Partners, and others.
