How Will it Affect You?

Once you have an understanding of the overall situation, you need to get an understanding of how it will affect your business.

Your want to anticipate any effects on the system, any potential triggers.

PrgrMini_MastergCrisis_VChain

Whether or not and at what phase your business will be affected depends largely where you are based in the global supply chain.

The more customer facing your business is, the more cyclical it is and the more your business depends on real life interactions of people, the earlier you may be hit.

The good news, if there are any, in this case you are also likely to recover earlier once the crisis is over. When you are further down the value chain, providing capital goods, or technology for example, you might be hit later, and it is likely that you only be hit if the crisis continues for a longer time period.

A good starting point to understand the impact of the crisis on your business is to see how the crisis will impact your value chain.

How will the crisis affect your customers, and may be your customer’s customers?

 

Will it change their behaviour?

Will it change the types of products they buy?

And how will it affect your suppliers, and your suppliers’ suppliers?

 

Will they be able to produce?

Will they have access to all the resources they need to produce?

Assign a risk level to each element along the value chain. Say you rate the customer risk, and the supplier risk from one to five.

 

Then dedicate regular time of you or your team to monitor those risky elements. Try to understand how they are developing. Visit forums where your suppliers or customers debate, read articles, speak to them. Try to get a feel for the market 'heat' at each step of your industry's value chain.