Supply Chain Risk Management

In the modern global business environment, it is a challenge to keep up with the ever-changing supply chain landscape, rapidly evolving capabilities of adversaries and competitors, strategic changes, the possibility of counterfeit and reused or substandard parts, cyber threats and vulnerabilities, and alternative suppliers.

Government program offices and commercial businesses must be concerned with production, sustainment, maintenance, security, and operations of important platforms and products. Guidehouse has experience helping the United States (U.S.) government, especially those involved in national security operations, and U.S. and companies across the world understand risks and vulnerabilities that could exist in their supply chain and offering strategies for addressing or mitigating those should they be found.

New technologies, teaming partners, vendors, the threat landscape, tactics of adversaries, and more are changing at an increasingly fast pace, due to activities such as mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and strategic partnerships.

• There are approximately three-and-a-half to five million changes worldwide in corporations’ legal and organizational structures, ownership, and controlling interests every 30-60 days.
• The National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States of America 2020-2022 identifies the protection of key U.S. supply chains as one of the five pillars of the U.S. strategy, with a goal to prevent attempts to compromise the integrity, trustworthiness, and authenticity of products and services purchased and integrated into the operations of the U.S. government, the defense industrial base, and the private sector.
• The National Counterintelligence and Security Center’s 2018 Foreign Economic Espionage in Cyberspace report stated threat actors are increasingly attempting to inject themselves and their cyber tools into the production stream of important U.S. national security programs.
• U.S. companies, especially those supporting the government, but others as well, have an increasingly high stake in knowing who is in their supply chains — from a risk, legal, efficiency, reputational, operational, financial, and other perspective.