Disruptions aren’t going away — but your ability to manage them can become your biggest strength. In this on-demand session, supply chain experts share a proven framework for identifying, managing, and responding to disruption risks quickly and effectively.
Whether you’re dealing with supplier delays, geopolitical shifts, or climate-related events, this session will equip you with the insights to build a more agile, resilient, and strategic supply chain.
Anne Sexton:
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining our session today, a part of the Supply Chain optimization series sponsored by Everstream Analytics. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping notes. All attendees are muted, but please send questions using the q and a box on the side of your screen. Please close any extra windows to prevent buffering, and we’re recording the session and we’ll send it out to you within 24 hours. With that, let’s get started. My name is Anne Sexton and I’m joined today by my colleague Vin Raimondo, a senior solutions consultant here at everstream. VIN has over 30 years of expertise in supply chain execution, risk management, and global trade management. He specializes in helping organizations navigate complex international supply chains and regulatory compliant. For our agenda today, VIN will discuss launching a disruption risk management framework, and then we’ll take any questions from the audience. And now I’ll turn it over to vin.
Vin Ramundo:
Thank you so much. Hi everyone. How are you doing today? Want to kind of walk through how companies and our customers help manage the risk event lifecycle. So really want to focus on that lifecycle within the solution. First, we want to looking at when there is a disruption, how do we identify that information? So when you see that there’s a disruption, what are you doing to analyze that information? What parts of our supply chain will be impacted and materials and final products are impacted, and how critical are those materials? So really being able to analyze that information. We’re also going to be trying to analyze and prevent these types of issues so that we’ll talk about some strategies around that. Now then when there is a disruptive event, really being able to quickly identify what’s affected. Can we deal with it or is this something that we have to worry about or is this something that’s going to be a small issue? Can I bridge the gap? Do I have other creative options? And then ultimately after the event, let’s try to figure out how to improve the process, how to make sure that we’re not doing the same thing again, learning from our mistakes, learning from the experience that we have within the solution, and how do we really truly communicate these processes across the entire extended network?
So if you think about when an event happens either before an event, and again some events you can talk things like strikes or potential hurricanes, we can predict when that’s going to happen or within the event, what do you do around that process? So really being able to understand how critical is this spend, what’s it going to do to my supply chain? Where did it actually happen? What geographic region? What specific customer or suppliers are affected by that? How affected is my supply chain? What products and materials are at risk? What is the criticality of that? So again, being able to understand how critical that issue is, how it’s going to affect my ability to produce products and go do them to my customers. And then also looking at what are the options that we have to solve it? Can we use a bypass strategy issue for the issue?
So again, everstream really has the ability to manage and understand and show you where these incidents are creating a digital twin of your supply chain so you can actually see that and now be able to communicate with the entire supply base to see eventually how that is affecting your network. So again, within 24 hours, the first thing we want to do is understand how this is truly impacted. So there could be a flood, there could be a fire, there could be a force majeure, there could be a strike, could be cyber attack. Being able to quickly identify, okay, we’ve seen this issue. How do we know that this is actually going to affect us? So we have tools within our solution that can quickly send out information, either through a feedback loop, through emails, phones, even text messages to confirm that this is actually going to affect our network.
And then once we determine that there is a potential disruption and this is going to cause issues, how do we build a strategy around this? So do we activate the business continuity plans that we’ve instituted? So if we have those plans, again, it’s a very strong process to incorporate them, especially on products or our suppliers have high risk within your network. And if you don’t have those continuity plans, can we build a bridge or buffer strategy? We’ll go into a little more details on how we can implement those. Do we align and communicate that strategy across the network? And then we can also communicate not only with our supply base, but if it’s ultimately going to affect customers. Again, the earlier you can talk to them about these potential disruptions, the more options you have. And we’re going to talk about a process that we call continuous crisis management.
There’s an acronym uda. Alright, we’ll talk a little bit about how that works as well. And then ultimately after we’ve triaged and to fix the disruption or we manage the disruption, we want to look at how do we leverage the event for change management. So how do we improve the process for the next time it happens, the next hurricane, the next blood. So we kind of go back and look at a port postmortem to analyze that information to understand what do we do? How could we have done this better? And really kind of manage that process.
So again, if you look at the typical risk management strategies, there’s a couple of different options we can handle to manage this process. One is that bypass. Again, if you can potentially avoid the situation, we’re going to try to do that. And again, depending on the type of issues, you have the ability to do that. Perfect examples of maybe a winter storm going to customers, we can replan the shipment, right? If we know that there is a port that’s on strike, use an alternate port, or if we know the strike’s going to happen next week, we can ship earlier. Being able to do that. There’s also things around upgrading. So let’s say if a supplier is there was a fire, a supplier that provides one terabyte, hard drives, well you know what? We have a whole slew of two terabyte hard drives. We can upgrade a component.
So we still give the customer their product and even upgrade them to make them happy. Again, being able to kind of understand what are the options around that. We can also replant production. So another example would be the ability to look at and see my production schedule. If we know that there’s going to be a disruption for a week, maybe we move out that manufacturing and move something in. Again, being able to plan around that or ultimately being able to remove those products from a purchase list. So you can’t sell them, that’s the last resort. You don’t want to do that. But again, being able to learn about that earlier gives you options within the system, keeps customers happy. Now if you look at a bridge strategy, that’s really tactical crisis management. So this is like when it’s happening. So when there’s an issue we can partially exploit.
So if you have something that’s stuck at a port because of a strike or if there was a bridge that collapsed, where can I get excess inventory to partially expedites to mitigate that response. If you have issues with suppliers that are not doing well financially, but they’re critical to your business, there could be options to financially support the supplier to keep them up and running so that they don’t go out of business so that you can keep getting your products. You could look at alternate sources. So again, we can use our system to kind of understand and analyze where there’s companies in producing those types of products where you can produce that information yourself, you can produce those products yourself. You can also do things like dummy assembly. Think about what happened during COVID. I’m not sure if any of you guys bought a car during COVID.
I know a couple of my friends had issues where they got a car with heated seats, but the heated seats didn’t work because they’re missing the chips and they had to go back to the dealership after. So again, doing that dummy assembly, kind of fixing the problem later. Again, it’s only in really complex more products, but again, having the ability to do that or again, worst case scenario, inform production or customers of those delays. And again, the earlier you do that, the better. So being able to analyze this information and be able to see it’s going to be much more effective. And then the last one is the buffer, and that’s more strategic crisis management. Again, this is really getting to analyze our network, seeing the information that you’re seeing, so understanding what the potential risk is. So again, our solution not only has that incident monitoring what’s happening today, but it also has that potential risk.
What potentially could affect. So again, if you have a whole bunch of suppliers in the hurricane region that’s in a hurricane region in the gulf, let’s say for chemicals, well maybe during the hurricane season you increase capacity of finished goods, you increase capacity of raw materials, you might have backup suppliers that are in different regions or geographic areas. So again, you can manage the sourcing, you could secure stock ahead of others. Again, one of the nice features of the system is if you could find out about this information earlier, potentially getting the products that are going to be the issues earlier, you could hedge commodities ahead of price volatility. A lot of our customers have been able to do things like that, especially with major disruptions, thinking about the war in Ukraine or what’s going on right now with Israel and Iran. And then lastly, being able to adjust production, financial and forecast. So again, if now there’s a huge potential issue, the earlier you know can notify people appropriately of the potential risk associated to that.
So again, we need to be able to communicate. This is not just something that you’re going to manage internally within your organization. And again, depending on the types of incidents, there’s going to be different people that you need to collaborate with and manage. So an example from a cyber cyber attack example, the purchaser is going to be sending a notification to the supplier. Now again, it’s probably going to be needed done via telephone because if there was a cyber incident, you can’t risk sending an email, right? Because that email could be sent returned back from the person that actually hacked that company. Again, lead time typically in that is less than 24 hours. So a cyber attack happens. You want to get on the phone with that supplier, contact them, what do we need to set up and manage that process? Once we do that confirmation, we’re going to look at the different teams internally, the cybersecurity, hr, the supply chain for center of excellence, production, purchasing leads. Again, collaborating internally using emails to kind of say, here, this is an issue. We have to manage that process. And then there’s a whole cyber team associated to that so that we can actually set up teams calls and really collaborate on how do we get this up to speed? How do we set up the appropriate processes and tasks associated to that problem? Really being able to get through and analyze that information to see those types of issues.
Now when there is a crisis, one of the standard processes that we talk about as a ota, observe, orient, decide, and act. This is really critical to understand how when a problem happens, how do you observe the issue, but also how do you orientate yourself and understand how you’re looking at that situation based upon your historical understanding of how you’ve dealt with this in the past, previous experiences. We’ll go through a little detail on that. Then ultimately create a decision, decide and then act on that. So really being able to manage that process internally within the organization. So the first step is that observe. So again, looking at and understanding, okay, when there is a disruption, so we have the ability to tell you that there is a hurricane or there is an earthquake in this region or there was a war or there’s a tariff issue.
Being able to understand how that’s going to affect me, but not only affect me, but how is that going to affect my competition? Because another issue is it might not affect me, but there could be an issue where a competitor has an issue and we’ve had customers use our discover solution to actually understand who competitors source from, who competitors do business with, what can affect this later, and really being able to analyze that. Can we make any predictions? Again, we have our applied meteorology team that can help facilitate predictions on weather, is it going to be a bad hurricane season? How’s the winter outlook, polar vortexes and things of that nature. We also have an in intelligence solutions team that can go out and analyze specific use cases for customers that have problems. We also can look back and say, how accurate were my prior predictions?
So again, being able to kind of say, we’re observing this, how well we’ve done in the past, we do. We always panic or are we underestimate the issue. So really being able to observe and take ownership of how we manage and understand that information. Also, there’s so many different things that you have to look at, regulations, resources, relationships of stakeholders. So again, really being able to look at the information, understand how we look at it and analyze that information to observe it within our environment. The next part is the orientation. Again, this is really being able to say, how do we look at this problem? How we’ve looked at it in the past. Again, are we looking at cultural traditions again, certain regions of the world, certain people going to be a little more optimistic, some people are going to be a little more negative.
How do we look at that and culturally understand that risk? We then have to look at and analyze that information. So we have to look at this and think of it from not only the lens of how I am, but ultimately how it could look internally. We have to look at and understand the influx of new information. So again, this is going to be changing. We have to look at previous experiences, new information, really being able to understand what we’ve done in the past and sometimes making sure that what we’ve done in the past doesn’t cloud our information of what’s happening today. So you really need to look together from both what happened in the past but also this new information. But really being able to look at this and get that, understand how that problem is and again, those previous experiences could help you, but sometimes it can also hurt you. So really being able to kind of understand where you are within the situation to make these better decisions within the solution.
And then lastly with what you want to do here is really look at these reviews of this information to be able to kind of say from the past what we’ve learned, we’ve got to set up new company policies to manage these crises. We need to set up approvals for exceptional budgets. Again, being able to kind of analyze this information to make sure that we know what we’ve done in the past and how we can set it up in the future. Implementing business continuity plans, again, that’s needing a regular review on those business continuity plans, incorporating them as needed, looking at specific strategic risk suppliers, looking at alternate sources, being able to set up these processes in place so that the next time one of these incidents occur, you have a plan, you have an action that you can quickly and easily execute. And also looking at again that corporate and enterprise security risk management, setting up those policies, improving and really setting up a center of excellence associated to your supply chain risk management processes. That’s what I had Any questions today?
Anne Sexton:
Thank you very much, Finn, that was a very interesting session. We’ve had some great questions from the audience. So I’m just going to dive into the first one. Can you explain how the platform helps you track risk alerts that you’ve shared?
Vin Ramundo:
Absolutely. That’s a great question. So if you look at what we do, the first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to map the customer supply chain in our network. So mapping the physical facilities that either suppliers or even customers, their plants, their dcs, getting all those locations within the system. We’re then also going to put in the transportation lanes, the material flows of those products, what the sub tiers of those suppliers, really kind of tying all those pieces together to overall get an end-to-end view of what’s going on within our supply chain. So that’s the first step, creating that digital twin. Then we’re going to overlay all the risk types that a customer cares about. Now we’re going to look at that both strategically. So initially we’re going to look at what is the potential risk. So now we’ve mapped the network, we’re looking at the strategic risk, and again, that could be internal scores that you provide like on-time performance, does the supplier be a business continuity plan, things of that nature.
And then ultimately risks that we can provide. So again now when you’re looking at your network, you can quickly identify what suppliers are at risk at flooding, what suppliers are at risk for geopolitical issues or war, right? So we have the ability to kind of analyze that, create plans around that. Then ultimately monitor the incidents that are occurring. So again, have over 140 different types of incidents that we monitor within the solution. Really being able to tag those incidents either geographically. So again, is tied to a specific geographic region. So say like a hurricane or a flood or an earthquake or is it tied to a corporate entity, something like a lawsuit, a layoff going out of business of bankruptcy. And we have various tools to kind of facilitate triggering those into the system. And then once that alert is instituted, there’s all plans around workflows, around sending out feedback, sending out notifications, confirming that this is an issue, creating action plans to analyze this information, how we manage that incident.
Even using playbooks to say this is a standard response associated to a cyber attack versus a bankruptcy versus a flood. Being able to set those up and incorporate those within the network to ultimately give our customers the ability to see before, see the issue before. And ultimately I think this is the most important part, ultimately understand how this is going to affect my supply chain. If you look at what’s happening today, I mean there’s wars, there’s natural disasters, there’s risks, there’s tariff issues. If you try to understand, look at all these things, you’re going to be running through and trying to find the needles within the haystack. Whereas if you mapped your digital trade, a digital twin within your supply chain, in our system, overlay the risks that you care about and then only be alerted to the ones that actually are critical to your business. You can focus on the things that you need to work on and kind of eliminate the noise. Does that make sense?
Anne Sexton:
Thank you very much. You have answered my next question, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Does the platform have action plan functionality?
Vin Ramundo:
Absolutely. And we have a couple different ways of manage that. We have the ability to triage incidents within the system. So at a simple basis to kind of just look at the incident and say, Hey, I’ve resolved this. I’m working on this. It’s clean. So that’s a simple kind of basic level of action plan. But we can take it to a next level where you have the ability when an incident occurs, when you’ve received feedback that yes, this is actually going to affect supplier or my trade or my trade lane or any issue, we then can institute an action plan. And within those action plans you assign users within it, you assign tasks, durations of those tasks, they’ll send out emails and notifications. There’s a concept of a playbook, so you can set up predefined playbooks. One of the things that we’re moving into is of a more AI-based understanding of how to solve that problem.
So I think it’s some of the really exciting things. We do a ton of AI on the backend, but we’re really now the focus of the company is to kind of move those into the customer’s hands. It’s a little harder when you do it in the customer’s hand from a security perspective, but one of the things that’s nice is we’re going to incorporate that information so you can create those. The system will give you suggested options of how to solve those problems. Really exciting new capabilities that are coming on that. But it’s so critical because once there’s an issue, what you do after that is critical, right? I mean the system’s going to tell you that there’s something that happened, but if you don’t do anything with it, there’s no value, right? But when you do, I mean it’s amazing. We have customers with one incident save seven figures because if they didn’t know about that disruption, we told ’em about the disruption, it was getting their sub tier before anyone in their network knew they were able to find alternate sources of supply, pick that up to hedge the delay that they had. Without our system, they would’ve never had that. They would’ve had a huge issue. Very, very, very powerful capabilities around that.
Anne Sexton:
That’s fantastic. And you’re right, of course, having the incident alert without knowing how to deal with it is of course not very valuable.
Vin Ramundo:
I mean, that’s the hardest part. That’s why we’ve implemented these playbooks and that’s why we want to get into, even right now, customers have to kind of set them up themselves and one of the things we’re working on is kind of have a self-learning understanding and having the system make those suggestions based upon best practices across our entire customer network. I mean, again, AI is really transforming a lot of how this is going and we’re really kind of in the forefront. We’ve been doing it for, gosh, almost 10 years already and we’re just keeping improving on that. It’s really exciting.
Anne Sexton:
We’ve got a few more questions from the audience. What types of feedback can you gather from suppliers after an incident?
Vin Ramundo:
So one of the things, it’s very flexible. So customers can basically create a template of what type of information they want. Typically customers at a simple level. And I think what’s really nice about our feedback we we’ve made really great improvements within the last release, is it could be automated. So you could say, Hey, if this type of incident occurs, send it out. The feedback that you get back can be configured by the customer, but typically customers are going to ask, are you affected? How bad are you affected? When are you going to be back up? And do you have alternate options around that? And some notes and comments around that. But again, it’s really up to the customer and our team to configure that feedback loop in a mechanism that would enable them to get the information that they need. But it is completely configurable based upon how we set it up for our customers, but we do have standard options for ’em as well.
Anne Sexton:
Thanks, Ben. Still got a few more to get through. Sure. Great. What are the biggest risks and disruptions you are seeing with customers right now?
Vin Ramundo:
So I think the biggest ones are, some of them are weather related and tariffs is not a disruption, but I think it’s adding a lot of angst anxiety. That’s probably the one I’ve seen over the past couple months that we’re hearing over and over again. But then the geopolitical issues with the wars, but the one that’s actually kind of rearing its head is more around bankruptcies because of what’s happening with the tariffs. If you look at, I mean, trade is almost shut down between the US and China, and one of the risks that we’re seeing is potentially a lot of these smaller companies could be going out of business, right? Because if a tariff went up to 50% and now they can’t sell their product because it’s double the cost or 50% more of the cost, they could be losing business, which could potentially, if they don’t have other domestic type of business models, they could go out of business. Those are the ones that we’re seeing a lot of right now. And then also port delays, port strikes, flooding, those are some of the major issues that we’re seeing as well as the regulatory issues around forced labor and things of that nature.
Anne Sexton:
Actually, your last answer flows nicely into the next question. For events like tariffs that aren’t one of events that change over time, how do you help understand impact and risk to suppliers?
Vin Ramundo:
Yeah, so this is a hard one. I mean it’s hard to get down to how much exactly the cost is going to be of these tariffs, but one of the things that we’ve been able to do is to map a company’s sub tier. So this is a really interesting use case for one of our customers was one of their suppliers told them, oh, we have to raise our rates because of the tariffs. Well, they leveraged our discover solution, we mapped their sub tier, we looked at their suppliers, and when we did the analysis for that supplier, we didn’t find any suppliers in China. So one of the things that we were able to do is that our customer went back to their suppliers, said, maybe we missed this, but we did a sub-tier mapping and we found no supplier in China. How are you incorporating that tariff increase miraculously that supplier down on that increase?
So one of the things that’s nice is you can again have this information to potentially when a supplier comes to you and says, Hey, there’s an increase. The other area is once you map that sub tier, we have tools that enable our customers to analyze that network, see where those potential risks are. So again, the tariff data is very fluid. So today it might be 50%, tomorrow it might be 20%, there might be a reciprocal tariff. So again, if one company, one country goes and says, we’re increasing 50%, but now they’re going to go back and say, we’re going to charge you 50% on this side. So all those changes, you really need to have a tool that enables you to quickly identify where I need to focus on mapping that information. The other thing I would say is a lot, this can be done with the software, but we also have our value realization team that can help you further understand and analyze that. And we even have some partners that can even go further with understanding the ultimate tariff impact based upon historical cost implications in the sub tier. So there’s a lot of different things that we can do and please come and talk to us about if these are issues that you have, we can set up some meetings to show how we can help solve those types of problems for you.
Anne Sexton:
Great, thank you. It’s been an interesting session, but we’ve got a few more questions. You talked about strikes and port delays. Is that something you can help companies predict?
Vin Ramundo:
I mean as much as if port delays, we are monitoring all the ports, we’re monitoring the dwell times, the analysis. We’re also analyzing historical data for some of our customers. So looking at historical ets, even building out suggested alternate ports. So this is some of the newer capabilities on the predictive models that we’re making for port strikes and things of that nature. Again, we’re monitoring the situation so as these issues occur, we’re managing it. Another thing that’s really important to understand is we were based out of DHL, there’s still an owner of a partial owner of us. We have insights into their network, so we can have boots on the ground on many of these ports that really, when something does happen, we can ask them to get the information, really helps us with the differentiation. It’s really important to understand. I think if you look at many of the risk management companies around there, most of them started with supplier risk, looking at financial risk and looking at things of that nature. We’ve always been based upon supply chain risk. We’ve always been based on looking at the overall holistic process, not just as origin and destination, but everything in between. So again, it’s kind of in our DNA to really understand the end-to-end process and it really, I think helps facilitate our customers getting a lot of value out of the system because we’re not just looking at a point solution. We’re looking at that end-to-end process, if that makes sense.
Anne Sexton:
Got it. And one final question, what kind of information do you get in a risk alert?
Vin Ramundo:
I’m sorry, can you repeat that?
Anne Sexton:
What kind of information would you get in a risk alert?
Vin Ramundo:
Well, you’re going to get, depends on the incident you’re going to get the, when it’s potentially going to happen or if it happens. So if it’s something like a flood, if we can potentially, there’s flooding that’s going to occur. You’re going to get updates associated at, you’re going to get the actual source. So we have a link in the system so that you can actually see the source. Sometimes it doesn’t really help you because it might be in Chinese, it’s in the native language. But again, it gives you the ability to understand where it’s actually coming from. It’s going to say how long the duration, it’s going to give you the severity of it. It’s going to give you insights into what that risk is. You can see an example here now. There’s a description, there’s a start date, the last update, and then the end date. So you could quickly identify where the risk is. You’re going to see the suppliers that are affected, the discover facilities, the lanes, the shipments, the materials, and even the feedback. So once an incident occurs, it’s going to link to the digital twin within in your network and quickly show you how it’s going to affect your overall supply chain.
Anne Sexton:
Thank you very much for your And thank you. Sorry, excuse me. Thank you very much to our audience members for attending today, and thank you for your questions. If you have any further questions, please reach out to us directly at Everstream ai. Happy to answer them for you. Thank you very much, everybody. Have a wonderful day.
Vin Ramundo:
Have a great day everyone. Thank you.
