What Are the Steeple Factors of Supply Chain Management?
STEEPLED factors can often also be referred to as:
PEST, PESTLE, PESTEL, PESTLIED, STEP, STEEPLE, SLEPT, LONGPESTLE or TEMPLES as it serves as an acronym to highlight the macro factors that need to be taken into consideration, to protect your supply chain activities against potential risk exposure.
Through identifying the potential influence or disruption that the following macro (External) factors can have on your organisations activities, and having awareness of possible external disruptions, enables the organisation to take a proactive approach and re-align elements or activities of their supply chain to enable them to continue to meet their business objectives.
STEEPLED Analysis is a strategic planning methodology that can be used across all business functions to discover, evaluate, organise and track external risk.
These Are the Elements That Make Up the Areas of Analysis:

Source: S.Randall
How Do You Use a Steeple Analysis in the Supply Chain?
STEEPLED Analysis is a strategic planning tool that can be used across all business functions to discover, evaluate, organise and track external risk.
The tool can be used in the following ways:
- As a planned review of the external business environment (six monthly for example). In this way, any emerging threats or changes in the marketplace can be picked up early and tracked for impact. It can also reveal a change in direction within your business environment that can help you shape your response to the change rather than be caught out by it.
- As a one-off in response to a sudden change in business circumstances such as the bankruptcy of a competitor, an emergency change in the economic forecast, an international event with significant repercussions.
- As a review of corporate or departmental strategy, by running a STEEPLED analysis of potential challenges in macro factors that could influence your organisational activity, could help to determine or shape your organisations corporate or procurement strategy, then running a STEEPLED analysis with a SWOT analysis could then identify changes in direction to be implemented.
To find out more on STEEPLED analysis and how to conduct this for your organisation, view the full Knowledge paper:
STEEPLED:

STEEPLED: login to view
Login to view our members-only guide to STEEPLED. If you would like to gain access to over 1000 members-only guides, webinars and papers join CIPS now. Login or Join CIPS
DOWNLOAD THE FULL GUIDE
For addition reading on this topic visit Supply Chain Management