In August, Ryder System Inc. received recognition as a “2014 Great Supply Chain Partner” for the 12th consecutive year. The 12th Annual List was  the result of a six-month online poll in which supply chain professionals were asked to nominate vendors and service providers whose solutions have made a significant impact on their company’s efficiency, customer service and overall supply chain performance.

Ryder Supply Chain Solutions is an end-to-end supply chain partner with more than 80 years of experience helping companies in North America and Asia transform their supply chains. Ryder provides a full range of services, from optimizing day-to-day logistics operations to synchronizing the supply of parts and finished goods with customer demand. As supply chains become more complex, Ryder leverages five strengths to deliver the best in supply chain execution: know-how, lean methodologies, a proven track record, deep expertise in key industries, and a breadth of resources.

ASIS’s Supply Chain Risk Management Standard


ASIS has released a new standard to help organizations address operational risks in their supply chains, including risks to tangible and intangible assets.

Developed by a global, cross-disciplinary technical team and in partnership with the Supply Chain Security Council, the Supply Chain Risk Management: A Compilation of Best Practices Standard (SCRM)is a practitioner’s guide to SCRM and associated processes for the management of risks within the organization and its end-to-end supply chain. The guidance Standard is a compilation of current best practices. It presents a generic approach to risk and resilience management that is applicable to all types of risk and all types of organizations.

Dr. Marc H. Siegel, commissioner of the ASIS Global Standards Initiative, says after the tsunami in Japan in particular, it was evident that many enterprise security executives were  “unaware of how intricate their supply chains were, so the group decided to learn from our experiences and create a set of best practices to share between all companies. The premise was that we looked at this as risk management activity, at risk as a continuum that you look at before, during and after an event.”

Siegel adds, “To build a resilient organization it is essential to understand the organization’s supply chain and how risks within the organization and its supply chain impact the achievement of objectives. This is the first standard to provide practical guidance, based on the experiences of both large and small organizations, about managing risks in their supply chain to increase their resilience capacity and create value.”

The SCRM Standard will help practitioners anticipate, prevent, protect, mitigate, manage, respond and recover from potentially undesirable and disruptive events, as well as identify opportunities. However, the best strategy for addressing risk events will be determined by the organization’s context of operations, its risk appetite and results of risk assessments. Adoption of this standard should build on rather than supplant existing specialized risk programs, says ASIS.

Supply chain risk management can be difficult for Ryder with its Mexico operations, says Gustavo Passa, Ryder’s security director for Latin America. Passa’s efforts are on stolen product and hijacked trailers while in route, and anti-smuggling and being in compliance with CPAT from U.S. Customs in order to avoid smuggling into the U.S.

“In Mexico, unfortunately, a truck in route is easy to steal,” he explains. “The only way to protect a driver is to give him a security escort, but that is expensive. The second reason is that there’s a black market for the products that are transported across the country. So in order to control or keep a truck and trailer safe, we focus our efforts on GPS and tracking devices to follow the load. We also have more than tracking device in each truck. We place one in the cabin, one inside the truck and one inside the load itself, and we monitor everything from a monitoring center in Mexico City. And if we spot trouble, we also have the ability to literally stop the truck in the middle of a route, call the police and send an escort car from a private security company to arrive as soon as possible.”

Passa notes that the bad guys tend to be “seasonal, but consistent” with their hijacking attempts. “They tend to strike late at night, on weekends or holidays and normally at the end of the month and the end of the year where there are more trucks on the road and there are more deliveries. But we know that too, and we are able to mitigate those risks with extra security efforts.”