Voluntary Supply Chain Security Program Impacts : an Empirical Study with BASC Member Companies

Managing security in global supply chains has been gaining increasing attention in business and governmental agendas since the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001. Since then several new voluntary government-business partnership programs have emerged to enhance security in end-to-end supply chains. However, a few programs have existed for a longer time, one of them is the BASC (Business Alliance for Secure Commerce) program, active as a business alliance in Latin America since 1996, originally fi ghting narcotics smuggling, and later converted into a holistic supply chain security management program. Understanding the implications – costs, tradeoffs, benefi ts, etc. – of security management programs is a complicated task, with very limited existing literature. This paper, being the fi rst survey of its kind, presents the results of the survey carried out with 102 BASC member companies, including: (1) the most commonly implemented security measures; (2) the most (and least) efficient security measures; (3) the relationship between the cost and effectiveness of the measures; and (4) the benefi ts obtained while implementing these security measures. Finally, the paper provides recommendations for governmental and company decision makers on designing future ‘win-win’ supply chain security programs.