The need for supply chain security more evident than ever in the aerospace industry, where seemingly negligible quality discrepancies in products and materials such as steel and aluminum can have catastrophic consequences.

Falsified safety documentation and supply chain corruption have been plaguing the airline industry for the past decade. with faulty flight systems, potentially weak materials going into industrial manufacturing, and now thousands of bogus jet engine parts that have found their way into commercial aviation, the plague continues to spread.

Click to read the referenced post: Bogus Supplier of Jet-Engine Parts May Have Faked Employees Too - BNN Bloomberg

When they saw that the nondescript identity of the "Quality Assurance Manager" included a generic name and a stock photo, it should have been a warning sign to the procurement folks conducting due diligence on this sketchy supplier of jet engine parts that everything was not as it seemed. Further investigation unvelied that the company, which has been operating 8+ years, has been supplying faux jet-engine parts with a catalogue of forged certifications.

While this continues to be a wake-up call for global buyers and suppliers of large scale systems, it's also an urgent reminder to all businesses that integrity, confidentiality, and privacy breaches still converge around the weakest link in those chains. So, efforts to conduct vendor risk assessments and insistence on independent audits have a real-world economic impact that must not be ignored. Nor should that impact be downplayed when disasters inevitably strike, because those serious incidents can sometimes emerge as catalysts for positive change.