Page 24 - the SyI Quarterly V3 digital (1)

Our Membership

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has shone a bright light on the above
dependencies and has left many of corporate clients realising that their main suppliers
and many of their third party supply lines are in serious threat as key components, if not
their entire product lines emanate from China or other Far East locations. I am spending
a large part of my time advising around third party supply lines resilience and managing
investigations and audits into failures to provide correct reassurance.

We are seeing stocks running low across the ‘visible’ market place but what many of us are
not witnessing are the hidden shortages that many of my clients are experiencing, recently
I heard a senior consultant friend of mine say “remember we cannot sell a car that is 99%
complete”. He went on to explain that many of the critical components (engine management
systems) in a modern car come from the Far East and are in short supply at this time.

It is worth stating for completeness that many of the initial countries that experienced
the first infections are claiming to have the disease under control and that we in the
UK and Europe are someway behind however, my experience in dealing with several
real world crises is that we are still very much in the thick of it and the wider social and
economical consequences are still to be felt by all of us as the true consequences will be
all-encompassing and protracted.

I predict that the very fabric of many of our society and business sectors will change
dramatically, and that many of the small, medium and large companies will fail to manage
this latest crisis and their internal crisis management systems will not be sufficiently robust
enough to manage the current situation and therefore will not recover from the sustained
period of uncertainty that will follow.

So what can we do to overcome this uncertainty? I am reminded of the saying “the best time
to plant a tree is 25 years ago, the second best time is today”, I am spending most of my
time at the moment working with several global clients managing the day-to-day activities
of their Crisis Management Teams (CMT’s) looking at what can be achieved in the current
situation to best manage this ‘uncertainty’.

After I had assisted the charity in question, I was asked by a second and then a third to
also assist them and due to other commitments, I reached out to colleagues in the Security
Institute, the Security Commonwealth, TINYg and the ASC and was inundated with offers of
assistance from the UK and Cyprus.

I have now passed several of these kind offers of assistance on to the charities and I think
we have now shown that working with charities on a pro bono basis is good for the soul
and the industry. I would like to personally thank all the people that offered their help, they
know who they are.

The advice I provide is often complex, bespoke to the client and differs for each of the
sectors. However, there are general points that can be passed across all sectors and
companies, I have decided to share some of these points as I believe in a time of crisis, the
worse thing we (consultants) can do is to close down discussion, withdraw advice and to not
share lessons learned from other similar events or incidents.

24