Franziska Nothofer:
Hello everyone, great to have you with us today and thanks for joining our live webinar, engaging Suppliers and Customers during a Crisis Strategies for Effective Communication hosted by Everstream Analytics. My name is FCA and I’m here today with Vin Mundo, senior Solutions consultant here at Everstream and the seasoned expert in the supply chain risk management space. He’s joining us from New Jersey and we’ll be sharing practical strategies for engaging suppliers and customers during a crisis to manage risk and keep your supply chain connected when it matters most. A few housekeeping notes before we kick things off, all attendee lines are muted, but if you’ve got any questions throughout the session, please pop ’em in the q and a box at the top of the GoToWebinar panel and we’ll then get through as many as we can during the q and a part. At the end, we are also recording the session so you’ll get a copy afterwards to watch back or share. Alright, with that we can get started and I’ll hand it right over to you win. Thank you.
Vin Ramundo:
Thanks. How are you today? Hi everyone. My name is Vin Raimondo. I really want to focus today on understanding how you can manage risk and the earlier you can manage that risk, the better you have the ability to solve those problems and get back to working at full production. Again, when you’re looking at risk management, you really need to see the earlier you can analyze and understand that that issue is occurring the faster your response time can be and the less amount of disruption you’re going to have within your supply chain. So again, earlier that you can see the disruption earlier that you can collaborate with the suppliers to act on it. The faster that you can get back to standard normal operating procedures. If you look at risk, there’s various different risks that are out there that you have to incorporate. So some of the things are going to be around planning, sourcing, making, and delivering. I think it’s important understanding when you’re looking at a risk management program to be able to look at all risks, not just sustainability or legal or financial, but things around logistics and plant closures and major weather disruptions. Really being able to understand how those types of issues that are occurring and how they affect your supply chain in your network.
So if you look at how we manage this risk, it’s going to really look at it in a couple of different ways. You really want to try to do things before a disruptive event. What kind of plans can you put into place? What can you analyze within your supply chain to see where those problems are, what type of materials and products that have the biggest impact of the biggest critical risk, and then how critical those materials. So really you want to look at before disruption, analyze and try to set up preventative measures, either looking at alternate suppliers, potentially looking at keeping excess inventory, and we’ll go through some of those examples a little later. When you have a disrupt disruptive event, now you really need to quickly identify if this event is actually going to affect your supply chain. I think what’s really crazy now is there’s so many different problems that are happening in the world, either geopolitically weather, natural disaster related, there’s kind of analysis paralysis.
If you don’t quickly identify, okay, is this problem something that I need to look at? Is this part of my supply chain? What suppliers or what lanes or transportation modes are going to be affected? And then what are my mitigation strategies? What do I can do to bridge that gap? How do I have some creative options? And again, the earlier and the earlier before other people, the more options you have to solve that problem. And then once you kind of manage the process and you’re kind of looking at that Monday morning quarterback looking after a disruptive event, well then we want to do introspective. Is this going to happen again? Is this something that we have to deal with if hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, being able to see and understand the risk associated that looking at things around, do we need to set up business continuity plans?
Do we need to create excess inventory? How can we avoid this crisis? Do we need to have alternate suppliers? Are there other ways that we can manufacture a product with non-critical materials that we can’t get or we have potential risks in specific areas? How do we need to do that and manage that within the system? So if you look at the different types of strategies that we can actually manage within the system to do this, you have a couple different options. So in that preventative crisis management, you have the bypass option. So kind of avoid the issue, right? So if you have in the logistics side, you have a potential port strike, you have Bridgets collapse, replan the shipment, don’t go through Baltimore, go through Newark for instance. If you have some major weather disruptions, you might be able to ship earlier. So again, if you see that there’s a snowstorm coming on Friday, maybe you call your customer and say, Hey, can we deliver this on Thursday?
Because there’s going to be an issue on Friday when you’re looking at things in the production on the make side, let’s say if you have a major disruption for your hard drive manufacturer for your terabyte hard drive manufacturer, maybe you upgrade your supplier to a two terabyte. We have options in there. So again, being able to upgrade, give more benefits to the customer and still be able to get the product out. You can also replan production. So if you’re talking about an inbound process, if you’re going to make these widgets this week, maybe make the widgets you’re going to make next week because you have the inventory of the components on hand for now. So again, be able to maybe replan production around that. And the last one, which you probably don’t want to do, is just not sell that product. That’s kind of the worst case scenario, but again, it’s better than making a commitment to a customer that you can’t keep.
So again, trying to analyze and see that information on the front is really important. Now the one that we’re going to focus on today is around the tactical crisis management. So now this is kind of the bridge. So now when there is an issue, what do you do? One, you have to identify two, do I do things around partially expediting those products? So again, looking at and say, okay, we know that there’s a delay on that ocean shipment. Let me air freight enough inventory so that we don’t have any type of issues. If there’s an issue around financial sourcing, so let’s say a supplier is out of business and they’re laying off people, you might have to prop that supplier up. If it’s a critical component that you can’t get from somewhere else, you might need to invest in that supplier so that you can still produce the products that you need.
The other option is to find another supplier. Again, sometimes it’s easier said and done. Also, it could take time. This is not something that depending on the industry, you can’t just switch people in and out. So there’s a lot of work involved around that. So again, you could potentially do that as well. You could do dummy assembly. This was a huge thing that happened during COVID. A couple of my friends got cars with heated seats that didn’t work that they had to bring back to the dealership after. So again, quickly seeing the issue, being able to solve those problems creatively. And then the last one again is the one you don’t want to inform the production customers of those delays. So again, when there is nothing else you can do, at least being able to inform people about the disruption and the issue and being able to be proactive, instead of them saying, where is it?
You can tell them, Hey, we’re going to have an issue because of this problem really kind of does help that process. The last one is that buffer, and this is more that strategic crisis management. So now if you have specific seasons of the year that could potentially have potential disruptions, think about the hurricane season in the Gulf. You might keep extra warehouse capacity for those goods. You might have backup suppliers depending on the season or you want to make sure for any critical components. You can find as many alternate suppliers set up in negotiations in place because if you don’t have those processing place when everyone’s doing a run, if you’re not a customer of that person, they’re probably not going to talk to you. Secure stock ahead of others. This is a huge one. Again, the earlier you know about something, especially when there’s a run on something, the better.
You can also hedge commodities against that price volatility, right? Against being able to hedge those commodities. If you know something before other people do, you might be able to buy goods before the price happens. We have a lot of customers that have been able to see major disruptions and then be able to buy those commodities before the price skyrocketed. People have saved hundreds of millions of dollars doing that within our solutions. Again, you can also plan better Now when you take the understanding of external risk in your production planning and your forecasting, you can make better decisions that are looking at a risk adjusted plan versus just looking at what’s happening in the world. So let’s get into the demo, wanted to show an incident and kind show you how we can manage this incident, collaborate with our supplier, get information from them, and then actually act on that to kind of manage the disruption.
One of the nice features of the system is you do not have to go into the system and log in to find that information. The system can proactively notify you of a potential problem and then quickly link into the system to see where that risk is and understand the impact on your network and even collaborate with suppliers and then manage plans within your organization. So here’s an example of an email that I would’ve gotten had a fire at Judon and Carol Stream. Now there’s not a fire there if you guys said those are your customers, it’s something just for a demonstration purposes to kind of show you the impacts, make sure everyone understands. So local media resource of the fire has erupted. I can click on this link and it’s going to bring me right into the application. It’s going to show me that incident.
So it gives me some news about the incident. So you could see what’s happening, a fire up it. Now again, this is a fire, so it’s tied to a specific facility. If this was a hurricane, if this was a war, you would see all the facilities that are impacted. And these could be suppliers, customers, manufacturing locations, dcs, it’s up to you what you manage within the system. The other really nice feature is when this does occur, we can automate a process to then submit information to the supplier for the supplier to say, Hey, are you affected? And they can quickly accept that and tell us if that’s an issue. So you could see here we submitted requests to the supplier. They’ve actually confirmed that this is an impact. This is critical because if you don’t know that the supplier, you see an issue, but you want to make sure and confirm from the supplier so they have the ability to quickly identify and say the details here, they’re impacted, the capacity, the delay, all they need is an email address.
It’s a simple website that they can link into to get that information to see what’s going on within that fire. So expensive fires occurred and it looks like the recovery is December 13th. So now is we confirm that this is an issue. We want to kind of understand, okay, what’s this in my network? So we have the ability to put in a material flow. So that shows you, okay, what components do I get from that supplier? What is in the network? And then what’s the final product and what’s the revenue at risk? So this enables me to really quickly understand how this disruption is going to affect who it’s going to affect within my organization and then potentially what alternates do I have around that. We’ll kind of go into that. So I can quickly see that this is from Veon going to Vinco and pni, Bosnia in Birmingham.
I have my food coloring that I’m getting from them and it’s going into candy and it’s about 27 million of revenue at risk. So this is a pretty big issue that I want to look at. Now, if I want to look at this in kind of more of a visual perspective, not an Excel spreadsheet, I can open a tiered visualization. So I can quickly see this is where judon is and it’s going to Visco and P bus, it’s going into candy, and I can look at these trade flows and see all the information. We even have the ability to look at this in the sub tier where we actually can use AI and big data to kind of map that out to see if there’s a disruption even with your supplier sub tier. And again, we can also view this on the map where you can quickly see that risk across that end-to-end network and I can click on my facility and then see how that’s affecting and where that is in the world.
Now if we go back, now we understand that we’ve got an issue, we understand that it actually is impacting one of our suppliers, it’s affecting two of our plants, and we’ve confirmed from the supplier that this is an issue we need internally to kind of manage the exception around it. So how do you do that as well? So if we go into the system we have of action plans that enable us to collaborate around this incident, there’s playbooks that you can define. So you have the ability to kind of set up a playbook. So emergency alternate supplier, my standard incident response, I can quickly set up a playbook to understand what are the tasks, who we need to collaborate, what are the due dates around this? You could see what’s been completed. So we’ve analyzed the incident, we solicited feedback. So again, I can look at this supplier confirmed that there’s an issue.
If I go back, I can even put in pictures and attachments. So you can see there’s a picture of the fire. So again, we know this is an issue, we have a problem, what do we need to do to manage it? Now we determined the downstream effects. We just did that. We understood that we have a couple plants that we have to worry about. We need to get food coloring. Where can we get food coloring outside of that area? So again, I could put this in completed. Then I can look at my alternate suppliers and then I can look at an alternate source dashboard that’s going to analyze and see where else I could potentially get food coloring from within my known network. So I can go to bluegrass and then I can drill into bluegrass as well to see what’s going on there. And they have some cargo delivery delays, but that’s not that big of an issue.
I can look at even the strategic risk to see what is there any type of major disruptions in that facility or type of strategic risk. And now I can actually create another plan to do my alternate supplier and I can even add that playbook, ege the alternate supplier to then add those tasks and assign those users appropriately. So again, being able to collaborate internally within the organization, be able to externally collaborate with the suppliers to ensure that there’s an issue, but to quickly identify the disruption, how it’s affecting your network and how critical it’s, I think that’s really the component that enables you to really start managing the exceptions around that. That’s really what I had from the demonstration perspective. I think now we go to questions to see what people have, if there’s any questions from the audience.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thanks so much Vin for the briefing and the demo. Let’s jump into some of the questions coming in from the audience. And the first one is, have you seen a disruption spiral out of control because of poor visibility or delayed information?
Vin Ramundo:
I think probably the best example, and I think it was so critical, was COVID, right? Being able, it literally disrupted almost the entire world supply chain, right? And it really was hugely huge issues around the world. One of the things I think that was critical that, and one of the insights that some of our customers have told us is we have a partnership with DHL. They were owner of our company, they’re still an investor. We have boots on the ground in over 500,000 workers around the world. So during COVID, we were able to tell our customers before a lot of people realized that things were going on in Wuhan before China kind of admitted that there was an issue. So again, the earlier you know about these types of disruptions, the better. And some of our customers were able to get product out of Wuhan, get out of China before everything was locked down, which enabled them to produce products for months after that they would’ve never been able to do. It enabled them to protect about millions of dollars in revenue, a lot of money around that.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you so much, VIN. That was a great answer. Okay, next one. Where do you get your data from and how is it validated?
Vin Ramundo:
That is an excellent question and an excellent, and it’s so critical because I think what’s important, there’s a lot of companies out there that just take data from alternate data sources and just plop it into the system. We actually have a couple teams within our organization. There’s a data science team that does a lot of the analysis to pull out information from the external world to find these notifications or billions of data points that they’re pulling out. But then there’s an intelligence solutions team that are analysts that are looking at that AI based approach. We’re consolidating a lot of the information, but there’s human intelligence on top of that, that actually curate that information, normalize it, put it into the system so that it’s, you’re not seeing the same issue multiple times. We’re only looking at issues that are tied to supply chain risk, not like, okay, just things that don’t matter.
So again, being able to do that. So that intelligent solutions team is as a team of analysts that are really curating it, looking at it 24 by seven across the globe, I think there’s 26 languages that they speak. We’re looking at information in various languages around the world. We’re normalizing that into English, puting it into the system. And again, that’s on the incidents that are not weather based. And I think the other very unique differentiator for us is our applied meteorology. This is critical because again, we build specific climate models that are tied to supply chain risk. So we’re not going to light up a fire saying there’s a snowstorm in Cleveland for two inches today. That’s not going to disrupt supply chains, but if you get a pool of vortex in Texas, that’s going to cause a lot of problems. I think the other thing that’s important is because we have our own meteorologists, we’re looking at things a little differently.
We were able to tell our customers months before the Panama Canal issues that we had over the past couple of years, we’re telling them that there’s drought conditions and typically when there’s drought conditions, the Panama Canal has water issues. If there’s water issues, it works with locks, they have to kind of fill locks up because they’re not the same. The Atlantic and the Pacific are not the same, the height. So you kind of have to go back and forth without the water. You can’t get the boats in there. You have to slow everything down. We were telling our customers that was an issue way before everyone else knew. Same thing with hurricanes and flooding and things of that nature. Typically we can be sometimes a day or two before the National Weather Service and things of that nature. Really important, again, day earlier, gives you the ability to know things that other people don’t so that you can buy products before there’s a run on them. We’ve had multiple instances, our customers, when a major disruption has occurred to be able to see, they knew about it beforehand because they knew about it. They were able to buy aluminum before everyone else realized there was a cyber attack on a major smelter, things like that.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you so much, VIN. That was brilliant. Okay, let’s hop on to the next one. Can you add customized strategic risks to the platform or are they set?
Vin Ramundo:
No, so very good question as well. On an incident basis, those are things that we’re monitoring. So that’s like the realtime realist. But on the strategic side, we enable our customers to one, we have integrations to third parties. We’re never going to be the best of the best for everything. So there’s companies that are specialized in say cyber or financial risk. We can integrate that information and you can put that into the system. But there’s also things that from a customer, our customers have a whole slew of risks that they’re monitoring that they’re doing outside the system that we are. You have the ability to incorporate those internal risks. You have the ability to create multiple risk models associated to a supplier. So again, if I’m responsible for financials, I can have a financial risk model. If I’m in supply chain or logistics, I can have a logistics risk model.
If I’m in end-to-end, I can have an end-to-end risk model or a business continuity or even an ESG sustainability risk model. And again, we can set up and configure these differently. And then the views and how you see it, the alerts, the notifications that come out of the system are going to be different depending on who the user is. This is critical because everyone, you want to have everything holistically in one place, but everyone wants a different view of that information. So if I’m responsible for sustainability, I want to see what suppliers have to worry about that from. But then again, if it’s a critical supplier, it’s a single source, well we probably need to talk to them. We can’t switch them out because that’s a critical component. So being able to have all this information in one place with the data that we’re able to look at from an external perspective with the internal information that you have, enables our customers to really understand how that risk is across their supply chain. And then when you tie that to the material flows of your products, you can quickly identify what revenues at risk, what are the highest risk suppliers, how do I set up mitigation plans around that in order to solve those business problems. And again, the earlier and when you are looking at this from a planning perspective, the better because once something happens, there’s not that much you can do. You want to solve those problems beforehand.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you Vin. We have two more questions coming through. If you have any further questions, please pop them in the questions box now and we’ll get to them. The next one is, are suppliers worried about validating disruptions for fear that customers will turn to the competition?
Vin Ramundo:
I think not really, because if you have a major disruption, I think the person that is collaborating with them and working with them, it’s a partnership, right? It’s not something that we’re not going, if this is an issue, we need to understand about the risk. The other thing we’ve had customers, I think one of the best case studies is we have customers that use our feedback loop and then their supplier becomes our customer because how did you know that this happened? We didn’t even know about these types of issues and then they actually start doing it. So I think understanding the risk across the network and understanding when these types of things happen working together, and again, the earlier is the better. So I really don’t think that’s an issue because we’re not trying to beat down people. I mean this is something outside of, a lot of times it’s outside of the customer, the supplier’s hands, right? It’s a flood or it’s a this. Being able to know about it and if I’m communicating with the supplier, at least I know what’s happening. If I don’t communicate, then I can assume that they’re just done and I’m going to go somewhere else. The ability to do this feedback gives the supplier the ability to give insights to our customers so that they can make an informed business decision.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect, thank you. Okay, next one. Can you share a recent case study where earlier intelligence made a substantial difference for your clients?
Vin Ramundo:
Yeah, so pretty good one I think we’ve used a couple times is during the war up in Ukraine. So before the war in Ukraine, we started our intelligence solutions team started doing analysis on, okay, if this war happens, what are the commodities? What are the industries that are potentially going to be affected? So we were doing situation briefs in December. So the war started in February if people don’t remember started in February. So when that started happening, what we were telling our customers, nickel fertilizers, sunflower, some of some metals are all going to be affected. So when the war happened, because we told our customers about this information, some of our customers started buying nickel on the commodity market about three days into the war, the price spiked. So this was a huge, they saved millions of dollars because of that, because we were able to tell them before there’s an issue.
The other example is what I was talking about with COVID. The fact that we were able to tell our customers before a lot of people, they were able to secure whatever they can get out out of that region before everything was locked down. Even during that time we were monitoring the COVID lockdowns around the world so that you knew, okay, these plants are going to potentially not going to be working. So again, early notification you have first mover advantage. I think that’s the critical thing, and I think that’s really important now too, is because the world is so vast and there’s so many, it’s such a supply chains are very broad. You might be buying something domestically, but they might be sourcing it from another country. Being able to understand those sub tiers, being able to understand that overall network is really important as well.
Franziska Nothofer:
Wonderful. Thank you so much, VIN. Okay. And then the last one, one more came through tying into the SubT tier topic. If disruption spreads beyond tier one suppliers, how can you see the full ripple effect?
Vin Ramundo:
So what I showed you before was looking at that visualization that showed you the tier one to the plant, and I think you saw there was a couple slides, a couple of areas that were behind that was tier two and tier three. We have the ability to use AI and big data to map the sub tier. If you know it, we can put it into the system and put those material flows in to understand the overall end-to-end impact. If not, we use big data and AI to build a specific supply chain view for your network. I think this is important. A lot of companies out there are doing subter analysis, but they’re doing it at a company by company or business entity by business entity basis. What we’re doing is we’re looking at the physical component that you’re sourcing, the physical product that you’re sourcing from that location and the plant.
And then we’re looking at what are the components that potentially can map into that and map into that. So when we’re looking at the network for the sub-tier mapping, we’re doing it at a much more granular level that is really trying to focus on the products and commodities and the actual physical facilities that our customer suppliers are using to do that sourcing. It is a collaborative effect and we’re going to look at that information, find the potential risk work with you, work with the suppliers to kind of get a really good understanding of that network. But again, what we’re able to do with SubT tier mapping, using AI and big data quickly enables you to identify where those potential bottlenecks are and then when a major disruption occurs, it’s not going to be just showing you the tier ones, it’s going to show you your tier twos and tier threes that are affected and then ultimately what products, what revenue are at risk in that disruption.
And that’s really where I think the customers, especially over the past couple years have really been striving towards. I mean the real enterprise class risk management programs are going to look at, I can’t just look at tier one, I need to look at the sub tier and I need to look at it not in a boil the ocean approach, but on a focused assessment to understand what are the actual components and products that are going into my network so I can quickly identify which ones are at risk and then if there’s a disruption, how am I going to manage around that?
Franziska Nothofer:
Wonderful. Thank you so much. Vin. Questions keep rolling and so we have time for one more. That’s brilliant. Thank you. Time for one more before we wrap things up for today, and then we’ll respond to any other questions coming through one-on-one after the fact. So here it comes. Is it possible to build what if scenarios in the system to understand potential areas of impact and strategize, for example, for the Ukraine war, what would that look like?
Vin Ramundo:
Absolutely. So I’ll give you a couple of great examples where people using this. The one that comes to mind that happens all the time is people that are relying on chemicals out of the Gulf, right? In the Gulf of America or Gulf Mexico, I guess now Gulf of America, but in the Gulf. So you have the ability to create a what if scenario, what happens if a hurricane hits, if it hits like Houston, it hits north New Orleans. You have the ability. The other one that the customers were using was the potential port strike early this year. What suppliers do I have and what sub tiers do I have in the Europe going into the United States? So I’d be able to quickly identify and draw on a map if something like happened in Ukraine, how’s that going to affect what impact, what revenue at risk, how many suppliers, how many customers? You can look at both ways. If you map all that information in the system, you can analyze it and you could create these scenarios. And customers do this all the time, especially during typhoon season or hurricane season, or you see something boiling up with Iran and Iraq, that war India, Pakistan. That was another huge one that people were looking at, okay, what’s my exposure? What do I need to worry about? Quickly be able to do that beforehand. Absolutely. That’s in the system.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you so much for talking us through that VIN and for running the session today, showing the platform in action. And thank you to our attendees as well for the great questions asked. Now that wraps up today’s session, if you’d like to get in touch with our experts directly, please email [email protected] and you’ll also receive the recording via email shortly. Have a great day everyone. See you soon and goodbye. Bye.