Franziska Nothofer: Hello everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. Great to have you with us today, and thanks for joining our live webinar around building a Risk Management Center of Excellence in your organization, hosted by Everstream Analytics. My name is Franziska and I’m here today with Mike Ontario, senior Solutions Consultant here at everstream.
With many, many years of experience in the supply chain risk management space, he’s joining us from Philadelphia. And we’ll be sharing some great tips and practical strategies for driving collaboration across your teams, aligning your risk mitigation efforts, and overall building a more agile and resilient supply chain.
Now, a few housekeeping notes before we kick things off. All your attendee lines are currently in listen only mode, but if you’ve got any questions throughout the session, just pop them into the q and a box at the top of the GoToWebinar panel and we’ll get through as many as we can towards the end of the session.
During the q and a part, we’re also recording the session so you’ll get a copy afterwards in your inbox. Alright, with that we can kick things off and I’ll hand it right over to you, Mike. Thank you.
Mike Antario: Thank you Franzi. Hi everyone. My name is Mike Antario and I’m a Senior Solutions Consultant at Everstream Analytics.
I’m really excited to be leading today’s webinar as part of our supply chain optimization series. We’re going to talk about a topic that’s close to my heart and honestly long overdue in a lot of organizations, which is building a resilience supply chain through a risk management center of excellence.
Let’s jump in.
So when we think about a risk intelligence supply chain, it’s not about technology. It’s not just about technology or data. It’s really about structure, ownership, and alignment. At the top, you’ve got enterprise level risk governance. That’s your board of directors and enterprise risk management teams, setting the tone and defining your overall risk appetite.
Then you have functional risk governance, which is where supply chain leaders like your chief supply chain officers and chief procurement officers step in. But here’s the key. The governance can’t operate in silos. It needs to be cross-functional, collaborative, and embedded across the value chain. The enablers.
Think technology platforms, workflows, or training, bring that structure to life. They allow organizations to apply those governance principles practically and consistently. And at the end of the day, the business, your planners, buyers, logistics teams should experience risk management as something natural and integrated, not an extrover burden.
That’s when adoption skyrockets and your risk pro, your risk posture really improves. Most of the organizations we work with follow a familiar journey in supply chain risk. Initially, things are fragmented. You might have crisis management on a whiteboard or Excel, but there’s no systematic view.
Then one function may be procurement or logistics starts noticing reoccurring issues and begins to formalize some processes. As momentum builds, more functions get involved. At this stage we usually see central risk center of excellence starting to form, and business continuity plans are then drafted.
Finally in the desired future state risk intelligence is integrated directly into planning systems. TMS, ERPs and SRMs data flows automatically. Each function manages its own risk within its scope, while the COE manages ripple effects and sub-tier supplier risk as certain examples. Our goal at Everstream is to help you move along this maturity curve from reactive to agile, from fragmented to fully integrated, and that’s where we come in.
We start with a supply chain health check, which gives you a clear baseline of where you stand in terms of risk maturity. Then we work with you to recommend the right governance structure, and that’s where the C-R-M-C-O-E often comes into play. We help you identify value drivers where risk management can improve continuity, reduce costs, and, and avoid surprises.
Our implementation approach focuses on a maximum adoption because even the best tool is useless if no one uses it. And finally, we conduct biannual reviews to see if your, to see how your risk maturity is evolving. We give recommendations, highlight gaps, and celebrate wins. That’s continuous improvement cycle.
That continuous improvement cycle is baked right into our model.
So what really is a supply chain risk management center of excellence, it’s basically a small but focused team that helps the organization stay ahead of risk and build a more agile, resilient supply chain. Why do companies set one up? Because risk management has become its own specialty. You need a group that knows the space and can work across different teams, ops, procurement, leadership, to keep everyone aligned.
A COE is a more efficient way to build out risk capabilities without creating a huge, centralized team. It’s cost effective, brings in the right expertise when needed, and make sure tools like Everstream are actually owned and used the right way internally. At the end of the day, it helps connect the dots across the business.
So risk isn’t just one team’s problem, it becomes part of the culture, and that’s really what we strive to do here at Everstream.
So the COE isn’t just a strategic think tank, it’s a hands-on partner for the business. Here are some of the day-to-day activities, right? End user support, helping procurement or logistics teams make the most of the platform. Negotiation support, providing insights that help strengthen your supplier relationships or sourcing strategies.
Feedback loops, continuous feedback loops extremely critical. Capturing lessons learned and turning them into best practices, value assessments, quantifying impact, and imp, and reporting on improvements. It also helps tackle big pitch picture issues like, uh, network restructuring or inventory optimization.
And of course, it manages the Everstream platform, keeping it aligned with evolving business needs.
Now, rolling out a COE isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s a phased journey. Pre rollout. We work with you to identify an, uh, an executive sponsor and run internal surveys to understand expectations and priorities. Phase one is all about getting the Everstream platform live and building the foundation governance, stakeholder alignment, and an easy process for data and network updates.
In phase two, you focus on growing adoption. Refining your approach and embedding change management practices by phase three, your COE’s running full state handling crisis support, building resilient uh, strategies, and driving continuous improvement. We also tailor team size based on your company scale.
So for a $10 billion revenue company, that might start with one to two core people and grow as maturity increases. And that can change based on, you know, general, um, revenue of the company, but then also in terms of how many people we have available.
So one of the biggest drivers of COE success is user alignment. If users end, uh, if end, if your end users don’t really see value or feel supported adoption stalls, that’s why we offer a layered support framework. Global multilingual support and coverage for optimal, uh, operational cont continuity training videos, how to guides and onboarding resources tailored to each role, direct communication through email chat.
Internal road shows and ask me anything. Sessions plus ongoing tracking everything from user satisfaction to adoption rates and resolution metrics. This enables your COE to not just deliver a system, but really drive real measurable outcomes. And we’ll talk a little bit more about this as we kind of go along.
So here’s what a COE team might look like, right? You’ve got your executive sponsor at the top, then A COE lead who manages crisis response platform ownership and best practices. But here’s the key. Everstream doesn’t just hand you a tool and kind of walk away, right? Our team makes our team rarely becomes an extension of yours.
So our product team supports integrations and feature requests. Marketing helps with internal communication and positioning. Our SMEs work on governance models and process alignment. Intelligent teams, intelligence teams provide crisis monitoring, weather alerts, and proactive research. Our customer success team ensures you’re getting value every step of the way.
All of these combined really allow us to strategically help our clients achieve a full COE and become more resilient as this structure gets built out.
Now let’s quickly touch on how we support specific supply chain functions, starting with planning. Our platform enhances the demand planning and SNOP cycles by injecting risk data into forecasts, right? So that allows you to do a number of things, avoiding demand drops, balancing inventory better and reducing the risk of production outages.
For example, if we’re looking at certain examples such as, you know, natural disasters or geopolitical issues. Having a tool that allows you to plan appropriately and reduce the risk of production stoppages, production outages, or stoppages in any sort of sense can ultimately allow you to plan ahead and plan better as you understand the obstacles that could arise in the future.
So the idea is to empower planners with risk intelligence so they can make smarter adjustment adjustments before problems hit.
And procurement is obviously another big focus area for us, right? So we support the entire supplier lifecycle from onboarding and sourcing to managing compliance and performance. By integrating Risk Insights into tools like Reveal, which is our real-time incident monitoring capability and discover, which is our sub-tier mapping capability, that allows us to understand the tier two, tier three, and so forth.
Your sourcing decisions become faster, they become smarter, and obviously they become more resilient once you have those tools that allow you to understand the full supplier lifecycle from onboarding source to contract, procure to pay performance management, offboarding. The whole way through. And this ultimately, this comes to the, so what, which, this reduces reaction time, right?
It helps avoid price spikes. Uh, it supports sustainability goals among other things, right? So we’re looking at all these other, other, uh, attributes that allow us to help our customers maintain sustainability practices and compliance, uh, minimize reaction time, and avoid those production stops or outages.
Finally shipment visibility, right? So ever stream’s. Capabilities here are especially critical in time sensitive logistics like cold chain, right? With predictive alerts and route monitoring, we help you reduce logistics costs. Increase on time delivery and improve workforce and equipment utilization.
So these are a number of different areas, especially with our cooling capability, where we can actually understand whether or not we need to use a different type of equipment such as a reefer vehicle instead of a normal 18 truck to deliver goods based on a temperature threshold. All of these help your logistics teams act factor, act faster and with confidence.
And the goal here is obviously to set your organization free of any sort of risk that could be impeding a shipment process, right? So improving service on time delivery, optimize equipment selection, and obviously enhanced workforce efficiency are among the key value drivers or KPIs that our customers are seeing today in flight with our application.
I know that was a quick, a quick one. Uh, we’re on 13 minutes here, but thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your time and I think we’ll at this point, we’ll open it up now for any other questions.
Franziska Nothofer: Yes. Perfect. Thanks so much, Mike, for talking through the best practice practices around the risk management center of excellence, and let’s jump into some of the questions that just came in from our audience.
So the first one is a great question. For companies just starting their risk maturity journey, what would you say is the most impactful first step they can take?
Mike Antario: I think the most impactful first step would definitely be to understand your supplier base. And understand where your suppliers are located geographically around the world.
Once we can actually understand where the supplier base is located, we can then formulate a process to include other individuals in our organization, especially in procurement, logistics, and planning to optimize. How we want to create a center of excellence based off of geographic region, but then also include other attributes like criticality of those suppliers, spend of those suppliers, maybe a certain commodity that they’re purchasing from those suppliers.
Once we have that foundational information and we’ve aligned the appropriate stakeholders, we can then begin the process to build out a, a center of excellence.
Franziska Nothofer: Wonderful. Thank you. Okay, let’s move to the next one. How do you ensure cross-functional teams actually use the insights and recommendations coming from the center of excellence?
Mike Antario: Great question as well. I think it really starts with having a leadership model in place, especially within a center of excellence is having a champion. And I think once you have a champion in your center of excellence that’s driving the narrative in the organization to make sure that the appropriate people in, uh, the chain of command within your team and within your company are following suit, you can then create drafted.
Step-by-step cases to plan ahead, right? So if there is an issue that that arises, let’s say, a natural disaster or geo geopolitical at risk, making sure that the people that are responsible for tracking and monitoring, those have the appropriate steps in place to make sure that they’re acting on those specific issues and following through with what needs to be done from business continuity perspective, but then on an ongoing basis, make making sure that they have the appropriate information that they need.
Drafted up by that champion to manage and understand the risks as they come across, whether that’s your network or your, your logistics network, either or. There needs to be some sort of drafted up response framework that’s kind of co-led or led by a champion within the organization to make sure everyone is aligned with how to properly delineate risk across the organization.
Franziska Nothofer: Perfect. Thank you. Okay. Another one around systems. So with so many platforms used, how do you avoid data fatigue and make risk analytics actionable for users?
Mike Antario: Yeah, I think it really just depends on the term, on the number of systems. Obviously when you’re dealing with a risk supply chain risk intelligence solution, it kind of.
Works in tandem with a number of other applications. So like ATM S, like a transportation management system, an ERP or an SRM system. I think it really starts with understanding the data that’s gonna be embedded in the, uh, supply chain risk management system. So within everstream, a lot of that data is coming from either an ERP or ATM S, and in some cases an SRM tool that allows us to understand risk in real time.
I think if what we can really delineate the pertinent information from, more vendor specific information like vendor IDs and pos and whatnot, and then, you know, which is often found in a procurement tool, we can then start to isolate, understand materials that are being sourced from certain suppliers.
We can then understand and isolate commodities and segmentation amongst those suppliers in our tool. Once you have the foundation of where data is housed holistically, you can then start to act in a much more retroactive perspective to enhance, uh, ownership of the Everstream platform. And then how do you go, how do you move forward from that?
Is, is having that champion within a center of excellence that really kind of drives the narrative in the organization. So a tandem.
Franziska Nothofer: Perfect. Thank you so much. Okay, we have a few more coming through. If you have any other questions, please pop ’em in the q and a box now and we’ll get to them throughout the rest of the session.
So the next one is a great one, I love this question. What are some signs that your risk governance structure isn’t working as well as it should be?
Mike Antario: I think some signs if there’s a lack of following up on certain tasks from a risk governance perspective you know, if there is a business continuity plan in place and no one’s following that that those are definitely red flags that we often see internally here at Everstream with our current customers.
And there’s just ways of tweaking that, right? Maybe that is enabling those users on training. Understanding what the pain points they’re experiencing day to day with their current day jobs, right. And understanding how we can facilitate helping them understand how to better utilize not only just the Everstream platform, but then from a risk governance perspective, how their actioning data.
I think those are kind of. Those two in itself really are, are areas where we tend to focus a lot of time and effort on is enabling our users that are involved in our application to better handle our tool and make the cases available internally in their organization how to best, uh, action data.
I think that’s really a key focus is kind of the so what. You know, there’s, there’s an earthquake. Okay. What’s the, so what of that is, well, there could be a supply shortage. There could be some sort of critical component that’s going into maybe an automobile. Automobile, for example.
Right. Which we see very often that maybe is impacted. So it’s understanding and aligning the, uh, best practices that we’ve created upfront with the Center of Excellence champion in the organization, and making sure we’re following suit on.
Franziska Nothofer: Perfect. Thank you. Okay, onto the next one. Can you set up different views or dashboards to monitor certain risks within the platform to support the COE?
Mike Antario: Yes, great question. Our platform is fully configurable at every single data endpoint that we have in the application, which also includes custom data fields. So as a COE, we often do see a number of our customers, uh, have their own unique views. We call them views in the everstream platform that allows them to triage risks, understand if there’s any outstanding.
Plans, we call them plans, which are business continuity plans, and see basically a bird’s eye view of what’s happening across your organization from a risk management standpoint, and keeping track of everything in unified views or dashboard views, that allows you to action a lot more quicker than what, what normally you could do internally within your organization.
Franziska Nothofer: Wonderful. Thanks Mike. Yeah. Okay, then we have the next one. From your experience, what’s the biggest barrier to establishing a COE?
Mike Antario: I think the biggest barrier is definitely going to be internal alignment. Because who’s going to own, who’s going to own that center of excellence? Who’s going to be the champion of the center of excellence?
And it really takes somebody that understands how our platform works, but then more importantly, understands how risk governance works. Because if you don’t have a good handle on risk governance frameworks and how their managed properly, that could turn a c OE Sour. And eventually dis disbanded at the end of the day because that person or champion that’s leading it has no sort of hindsight in terms of how best to manage a, a center of excellence and how to properly bring in the appropriate individuals should an issue arise from a risk governance perspective.
Franziska Nothofer: Perfect. Thank you. And we just had one question come through directly tying into this one. So who normally owns the center of excellence? What role do they normally hold within an organization?
Mike Antario: Yeah, great question. Generally it, it could be anyone, right? It’s anyone I think from the bottom up that feels like they have a very good grasp in terms of how to manage a relationship with a vendor and understands the practices that go into it.
From a business continuity perspective, from a risk perspective, they have the will and the drive to align, uh, risk strategies, risk mitigation strategies, and build out a framework that allows their company to be extremely conscious of risk and avert risk. That’s really what it takes at the end of the day, is having somebody that’s conscious minded that has a drive to be resilient within their organization and kind of take hold of that.
It doesn’t have to be the lowest level individual or the highest level individual in an organization. It really just has to start with somebody that has a champion like mentality that, um, has a drive to make their company more successful. And that could be in any, any part of the organization, procurement, logistics, planning, um mm-hmm.
Ops, for example. It really doesn’t matter who, it’s just more of the. Charisma and the, uh, championship attitude that allows them to thrive and build A-A-C-O-E internally.
Franziska Nothofer: That was a great answer and it basically answered the next question as well, which would’ve been around how do you keep the momentum going after the initial rollout, especially when competing priorities come into play. So we’ve basically answered both of them in one go. Thank you so much. Okay. And then we have one more for today. What kind of business value or ROI can organizations expect from a center of excellence?
Mike Antario: That’s generally set up at the very beginning of starting a center of excellence is understanding what are the value drivers that are very important to your organization, depending on your industry whether that is obstructing risk at a site level, whether that is reducing cost from a logistics standpoint if you’re very focused on logistics risk.
So I think there’s a number of different areas that you can kind of. From our perspective, it really just depends on your industry, what your organization is very conscious of. May, maybe it’s conflict minerals, maybe it’s forced labor and understanding and, and, uh, mitigating risk as it relates to forced labor.
Like how are you going to tackle a. The value drivers that your organization cares about and what to remediate. And that really just depends on what the goals are of the COE, if the goals are focused on driving resilience in mitigating shipment risk, how are you going to go about utilizing the, the Everstream platform, for example, to mitigate shipment risk?
Well, you would load in the shipments and understand from a risk perspective, what are the highest risks based off of every shipment, or let’s. The tables a little bit. Maybe you’re very focused on mitigating risk at a site level. So then how could you mitigate risk at a site level where we can categorize suppliers based off of criticality and spend, start there, and then from a risk standpoint, appropriate the right risk profile to those sites to then mitigate risk at a top down level to make sure that you’re acting on things in real time.
You’re following suit. So once you’re able to kind of set a stage or a plan on how you’re gonna mitigate risk, depending on your use case, depending on your industry, the value in the ROI comes suit, comes along with that, those specific mitigation actions. And we’ll obviously be a partner in, in helping you stand that up.
That’s what we’re here.
Franziska Nothofer: Wonderful. Thank you so much Mike. And also thank you to our attendees for asking so many great questions today. That was the last one, so we can give everyone a few minutes of their time back. If you have any further questions coming up after the fact, or you’d just like to get in touch with our experts directly, please email [email protected] and you’ll also receive the recording via email within the next 24 hours straight to your inbox.
Okay. Have a great day or evening, depending on where you’re joining us from, and see you soon and goodbye. Thank you.