OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Research Institute announced the immediate availability in Japan of SCRKeeper, Japan's first cloud-based supply chain risk management service to assess and manage the business continuity capabilities of suppliers.

Developed together with Fujitsu Systems West Limited, the new system is able to evaluate and analyze a partner's business continuity capabilities in the case of natural disasters and other unexpected situations. It can also instantly download the latest publicly available hazard map data and provide damage forecasting and assessment for the regions where suppliers are located. As a result, it is possible to predict the business continuity capabilities of suppliers, while also running disaster simulations to determine the impact that disasters would have on a customer's own operations and the amount of time required for recovery.

Furthermore, when a disaster does actually occur, the service is capable of aggregating disaster status reports from suppliers, in addition to providing support that enables customers to quickly select alternative suppliers and adjust production management.

In 2011, major natural disasters, including the Great East Japan Earthquake and floods in Thailand, had a tremendous impact on Japanese manufacturing by putting a stop to production and delivery. In many cases, these problems were not due to direct damage, but rather the damage incurred by parts suppliers. This renewed focus on the vulnerability of suppliers has led many companies to strengthen their efforts to map their supply chains and evaluate risk. The process of individually examining and evaluating each company in a supply chain, however, is very work-intensive. Moreover, the suppliers being examined were obligated to respond to survey requests from multiple companies, which had an adverse impact on efficiency.

Since 2007, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Research Institute have provided consulting services to over 30 customers to jointly evaluate their supply chain business continuity capabilities. Action was taken to develop common risk assessment standards and analytical methods, and build a framework for visualizing the impact that disasters will have on supply chains. This new Fujitsu cloud service offering was developed and based on the system put in place for Toyota Motor Corporation.