Week 4 Formal Paper

Week 4 Formal Paper

Introduction

The purpose of this assignment is to describe and evaluate the report issues by the Homeland Security in July 2007, by the name “Strategy to Enhance International Supply Chain Security”. The assignment will briefly provide an overview of the ten distinctive sections of eth report, while discussing five of them in greater detail. Supply Chain Security is a perspective in international relations, through which countries determine and assess possible threats that are present in a given scenario. It needs to explain the objectives, strategies and challenges present in the scenario of an international transaction of trade, in which different issues may arise (U.S Department of Transportation, 2009). Mainly this report concerns the easy and uninterrupted flow of cargo through the entire supply chain, and sheds light into the aspects of transportation security in international trade and shipments.

Discussion

The ten sections of the report “Strategy to Enhance International Supply Chain Security” include Purpose, Scope, Guiding Principles, Considerations, Methodology, Roles, Strategic Element, Response and Recovery and Training/Exercise Requirements. The Purpose of the report is a section where the strategy is basically analyzed with respect to its goals and strategic objectives, while also providing an account of risk assessment. The section of Scope, as the name suggests, studies about the constraints and boundaries of the report's themes while evaluating how this report links to prior documents and their learning. The Guiding Principles of the report relates to studying its prevention, response, and recovery mechanisms along with studying the role of technology and its impact (U.S Homeland Security, 2007). The section of Considerations and Assumptions relate to the background of the strategy and how does a theoretical framework tend to build upon the strategy in question. The Strategy Development Methodology aims to explain how does the strategy adopts practical knowledge and culminates into a well-coherent structure in the form of policy making. It tends to suggest and explain how the policy is framed, mixing theory with knowledge. It tends to establish the fact that policy was made using a multi-tiered approach (Widdowson, 2007).

The section of Roles, Responsibilities and Authority explains the job description of different members in the cargo supply chain and assess how each one of them relates to the entire process. They are held accountable for their tasks, and each task gives way to another. The Strategic Elements of the report is an account for various performance measures that tend to align the performances with the strategic objectives (U.S Homeland Security, 2007). International standards, schedules, policies and milestones are also covered in this section. Response and Recovery is a section that seeks to identify different responses to the implementation of the strategy and its recovery procedures. Lastly, the report covers Training and exercise Requirements that provides an elaborated approach to transportation security preparedness.

Purpose

The fundamental section of this report deals with eth purpose in laying out the strategy for international cargo supply chain security. The most prominent elements of this section is the goals and objectives ...