Ardent Partners’ analyst team attended the 100th annual Institute for Supply Management (ISM) conference in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago. Risk, in many of its forms, was a regular topic throughout the event – from Dr. Robert Gates’ opening keynote on global instability, to discussions about conflict minerals compliance, food risk, contract risk, and sustainability issues that occurred over the course of the event. As students of risk (new ones seem to pop up every year), we sat in on many of these presentations and thought that an interesting way to highlight them would be to present a series of discussions on the speakers and how each contributed to the conversation about global supply risk.
Today’s discussion is on the hidden risks lurking within an organization’s contracts and supplier relationships, which was presented by John T. Shapiro and Jeffrey Mayer, partners at Freeborn & Peters, LLP.