Franziska Nothofer: Hello everyone, great to have you with us today, and thanks for joining our live webinar, risk Identification and Mitigation Strategies for Logistics hosted by Everstream Analytics. My name is Franziska Nothofer and I’m here today with Jason Flake, our Director of Solutions Consulting here at Everstream, who’s joining us from Germany.
Jason will be sharing practical tips and insights on managing logistics risk, and we’ll then dive into the Everstream platform for a live demo. A few housekeeping notes before we kick things off. All attendee lines are currently muted, and if you have any questions throughout the session, please 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 during the q and a part.
At the end of today’s webinar, we’re also recording the session so you’ll get a copy afterwards to watch back or share. Alright, with that I’ll hand it right over to you, Jason. Thank you.
Jason Flake: Thank you Franzi, and hello everyone. Thank you for giving us some of your time today. My name is Jason Flake. I’ve been with Everstream Analytics focusing on supply chain risk management for about five years.
And in my past I’ve also worked on many projects, building or implementing supply chain software for routing and scheduling projects, network design and optimization and transportation management. Solutions from the bid tendering of procuring the transport, uh, through the, you know, planning and execution and freight financials.
And I’ve also done those from a perspective on behalf of a shipper and also as a logistics service provider. But one thing that each of those projects and software solutions had in common is they did not incorporate external risk into each stage of the transportation logistics lifecycle. It was all about costs and performance, which it still is today.However, with technology like we offer at Everstream Analytics, there are many opportunities to incorporate strategic, tactical, and real-time risk into your logistics processes. So it really comes down to a, to a few things that, um, that I need. So I need to have the ability to monitor and report on a wide range of things, which could impact my logistics performance and costs.
Because costs are king, and so I would just want to know what can go wrong both today, but what happened in the past and what’s going to happen potentially in the near future. I need the ability to know that as early as possible because that will maximize the time I have to evaluate mitigation actions if required.
JTo do that and to prioritize the different risks that I’m seeing. I need to understand the impact, which transportation, routes, lanes, ports, right? Which of my planned shipments, uh, or in transit shipments are potentially impacted by, by various events. So that is the starting point to make decisions. So let’s first take a look at, um, what in the world can go wrong in, uh, in logistics.
So containers can get lost and damaged en route or at port. Uh, we’re looking at a border closure here where the trucks are are lined up. So those delays can impact my lead times for an uncertain amount of time. Uh, port congestions and waiving times impacting throughput capacity at ports that can quickly get out of hand, as we’ve all seen over the past few years.
There could be customs delays, and this could be something unexpected or it’s announced that I, and I can prepare for it in the future. Um, or it’s just simply based upon, you know, the regulations of the countries from where I’m sourcing of my materials or where I’m shipping my finished goods. It’s just an inherent risk based upon, you know, the, the geography or country of operation.
Bridges collapse, you know, whether it’s an earthquake or, uh, as we saw last year with the, uh, the ship collision in Baltimore. So that, uh, that causes a lot of issues. And, uh, there are all sorts of strikes, you know, so at Everstream we’re tracking driver strikes, port strikes, you know, cargo, general cargo strikes, rail strikes, aviation workers.Those are all types of things that impact, uh, my logistics and transportation network. But we’re not finished with our risk. Uh, it’s not always physical, right? Perhaps one of my contracted logistics providers is filing for bankruptcy in their local court anywhere in the globe, and we, we picked that kind of information up and get it to you very soon, where I can then start to make decisions, understanding the impact of how much I rely on them.
You know, what are my other, you know, contracted carriers? How much capacity have I had I dedicated to them? How long do I have until I have to switch? Cyber is also not really physical and it does occur in the logistics realm. Maybe some of you have have experienced it. So for example, port operators get hit and that can, uh, you know, really impact the port, which then ties back to the congestions we talked about earlier, or wildfires and other natural disasters can disrupt major truck trucking routes.
There we’re looking at, uh, California the. So we’ll end it. We won’t go forever. But, um, we, we cover so many things. I just wanted to share some and give the visuals, but, uh, you know, everyone, uh, is, was aware of, you know, typhoons, uh, wreaking havoc on, on airports, and, and I. Ocean ports. Um, the good thing about typhoons and risk management is these are things which can also be predicted, uh, in terms of, you know, when the storm is starting.
So we have our own internal meteorology team, applied meteorology, and we provide a 15 day, hour by hour forecast of the cone of impact, wind gust speeds, precipitation, et cetera. That give a very early warning and insight into how much will this impact, you know, me or my customers or my suppliers. And specifically what we’re talking about now are, are transportation lanes.
So it could be a typhoon out at sea that’s not going to make landfall, but it is likely at, let’s say in, you know, 12 days from now going to be greatly impacting one of the major shipping, uh, shipping lines. Now we had strikes earlier, but, um, you know, there’s also driver shortages and this can have other impacts, you know, raising prices, limiting my options of, uh, of providers and power outages, you know, stop cargo, uh, straight in their tracks.
So there’s an airport out over there. And then this is the one that was, uh, the final one. And we all, we’ve all seen the, uh, the evergreen situation a couple years ago. Um. Causing the Sue Canal closures and now we have the Red Sea. Right. It’s a lot of activity over there. And I, personally, I’m in Germany, so I’m happy that we track, you know, low water levels and, and rivers that, uh, where there’s a lot of cargo transport.
So this is a picture of the Rhine and we give early warnings on, uh, inability of barges to pass based upon the, both the, you know, current level, but also the expected precipitation, uh, coming. So I guess to summarize this, you know, including the train, the train, I got cargo derail over here. But, uh, I shared these examples because the good news is that at Everstream we deal with these things every day, right?
We have, we have people on the ground. We’re connected back into, uh, DHL as part of our history. We’re not DHL, but we have access to a risk network there and. We are then providing, you know, risk scores and, and alerting proactively to both, you know, our customers, human stakeholders, but also into IT systems such as A TMS or an ERP, right?
Or warehouse management system, control towers, uh, et cetera.
Before diving into logistics details, I want to provide a short overview of what we do end to end and where logistics, uh, sits in that. Uh, so many of our customers, you know, they might start with a different use case and then when they find out, Hey, you guys can do logistics as well. They say We’ve gotta get our, our, you know, supply chain or logistics team over.
Because we might’ve started out just talking to the procurement team for raw materials. Right. So what we do at Everstream is we map a supply chain that there are many different entities, and I’ll just build this out. Um, but anything that we map, then we can provide risk assessment scoring for any of the locations that we map.
And then we’re monitoring every, every different entity, uh, and alerting if things are severe enough. And we also expand visibility. So if we look at this sample supply chain, I’ve got some suppliers, um, you know, various materials that I buy from them. I’ve got my own production plants for this supply chain where I make my own products and I’ve got customers maybe, you know, they’re, you know, warehouses or logistics hubs between my suppliers and me. Maybe I have warehouses, uh, you know, downstream as well. So those could all be monitored. I know what I’m buying from that tier one, and I know which plants it goes to, so it’s not a, you know, necessarily a physical link, but it’s understanding what I buy from which supplier. But at Everstream we really think, you know, just trying to de-risk the supplier, uh, and the supply, we really need to also de-risk the physical means of how that supply gets into your network.
And so that’s where the shipments and the lanes come into play. And so it’s very easy for us to map in any mode of any mode of, uh, transport, right? We have built in networks within, within our platform where we can, you know, do the road rail, you know, ocean, et cetera. And we can also manage that for shipments as well.
So think of that as a lane with a, you know, a starting time and end time inbound, outbound, intercompany, right? All of that we can, uh, can easily manage with an everstream. In terms of expanding visibility just for awareness is that’s where we have an approach to. Without speaking to any suppliers, we identify likely sub tier suppliers.
That’s a topic for a whole nother webinar, so we won’t get into that today. But from a logistics perspective, what gets gets interesting when you map into the sub-tier as you suddenly have a view of. Additional ports or airports or rail terminals or border crossings that are going to be important to your network even that you didn’t know about now based upon where the sub tier concentrations are.
And then finally, you know, we also monitor from a commodity perspective, but we’re going to focus on the logistics parts today.So we think of our, our solution here, as you know, providing intelligence for smarter logistics. We look at, you know, monitoring the network in the lanes, as I just showed. We do have deep dive capabilities and data on ports specifically for the ocean ports. Um, and we also get into the shipment exception management of really looking at that timeline of a shipment and even taking milestones to understand where the shipment is and doing the forward projection of risk for the rest of that shipment.
So we look at this visually then, and we, we can focus on three areas of really, you know, the supply chain or the logistics network first. Right? So this is. It’s more static. It’s not as dynamic as, as the shipments. But this is that mapping of, you know, the most important, you know, things that I, that I need to monitor and the insights that are gained via the monitoring and the risk assessment can help at other stages of the transportation cycle.
So, for example, if I look at, you know, key international ocean lanes evaluating which ports are riskier than others, and understanding the past throughput and the wait time or the dwell time at the airports, I could use that information. For example, to confront my logistics service provider who may blame worsening performance KPIs on the ports.
You know, not expecting that I have that detailed history, and that’s a real example from a customer actually. They were trying to get, uh, charged, uh, some detention, uh, de detention fees. Um, we also, you know, we also, you’re also building a history of all the events that are impacting, whether it’s, you know, your carriers or your lanes, uh, the infrastructure, and you’re building that over time and understanding trends.
So I mentioned Insolvencies earlier, but if we look at the carriers, then we’re also monitoring and reporting on anything that has to do with, you know, mergers and acquisitions and layoffs. They might be involved in some litigation, right? They might be getting sued for something or claims of, you know, workers’ rights, abuse and, or there might be sustainability, maybe some environmental fines that they’ve, they’re facing or, um, or, or looking at from a legislation perspective.
And when we move to the right. Then we’re looking at the shipment risk. So in this case, you know, typically it’s a, you know, transportation management system or within an ERP or the logistics service provider. That’s the LSP that I’m showing here. Um, this is where we ingest that data, typically via API or there’s other execution systems, and in some cases via flat files.
But the earlier we have it, the better because that maximizes a planner’s time to take decision. So we encourage. You know, as soon as a, a shipment is planned, whether that’s a manual process, um, or a, you know, a, a, you know, a batch process and automated, as soon as that thing is planned, the we need to know about it so that we can immediately monitor.
And so we’re looking from the, you know, up until the, any issues that could impact it before the departure, and then any issues that could have packed it after the departure and until the final arrival. So really looking at that timeline and as a shipment goes through the full process of planning, right?
So, you know, your rating, you’re looking at service options. You’re tendering, maybe a carrier, one carrier rejects it, you know, all of that can cause updates to, to the shipment. And you, you know, you might be, you know, rescheduling appointments for example. Which changes the timeline of the shipment. So via API, then we are, you know, keeping up to date on that shipment such that we can, you know, identify again anything that when it’s urgent enough, we can raise an alert back to the, the systems or to the planners themselves.
And so at Everstream Analytics, you know, we don’t have the rates, the contracted lanes, capacity commitments, et cetera, but you do, and that is where you can drive decisions, right, based on, you know, specifics of your customer or the, you know, the intercompany move. If saying, Hey, I can, maybe, I’m only going to set expectations.
This is going to be late, and I can share the information from Everstream of, you know, what we think might be impacting this and just, you know, you don’t have to make any changes, but it’s, you know, good customer service. I. Right, or I might be wanting to actually reschedule and with Everstream as I test those different rescheduling possibilities because we have a timeline of risk.
Be able to see, hey, if I, you know, if I reschedule that for tomorrow or three days later, or for next week, then you know, then things are looking green again, and we don’t have to have to worry about anything. Could get a little more, you know, you could be changing a service level saying, Hey, you know, we’re gonna have to go to the.
Go to the, you know, the faster service to, uh, in order to avoid this or, uh, a slower service as well, which could also avoid something which is, which is happening. And then, you know, you could evaluate changes of origins and destinations as well, or the route along the way, for example. And then finally, a little bit more extreme is, you know, maybe changing a transportation mode.
Now if we look on the right hand side, getting into the shipment execution, then once shipments go in transit, right, we’re architected to receive those milestones and that allows us to update the portion of the shipment that we’re monitoring, right? So we do not, you know, we’re not a, a provider of in transit visibility of where is the container, but we do integrate to those types of solutions for a risk adjusted in transit visibility.
So to enable this, then we have a, you know, a full suite of APIs when we can integrate to pretty much any system. And here’s just, here’s just some examples, excuse me, is my phone ring, um, that disrupts me. But, um, so both multiple different systems. I’m showing some examples here. So specifically within, you know, the TMS world, you know, SAP.
BN4L Business Network for logistics into Project 44 as well. So they’ve got the real time transit information, um, Oracle Transportation Management System. We’ve got a link with Uber Freight and work, work with them on various, uh, use cases such as risk adjusted ETS specifically for them, but there’s, you know, other interesting use cases that we have that you see here. And we’ve kind of, we’ve already talked about the strategic location and real time risk for shipments, but we do offer a temperature, uh, protection. Uh, capability. So this is to, you know, looking out into the future of a temperature and we can determine if a, you know, a, based on product, uh, conditions and the temperatures, if it would be severe enough where I need to have a temperature controlled equipment, which costs more and has more. We’ll move into a couple customers before we look at the, look at the solution and answer some questions. But, um, if I look at, you know, here’s the three examples of our customers who we are an integral part of their control towers. And so, you know, Google does a lot with us, but with specifically for logistics, right?
They’re ingesting, you know, the, the everstream risks into their logistics control tower, and they’re monitoring that shipment risk of high value network infrastructure cargo. So they’re really wanting to keep on top of that, make sure nothing happens. Uh, Schneider Electric, they’ve got seven control towers and, you know, they’re facing situations ’cause they’re so, they’re so massive.
There’s always a critical situation that could impact their delivery to customers or their own production. And, um, you know, they’ve reported great increase on, uh, on-time delivery and also minimizing expedited freight. To us, and then we’ve got Fair price. Fair Price is Singapore’s largest retailer. And as you can imagine for their, their supermarkets, there’s not a lot of nearby sourcing.
And so they’re really monitoring risks to various food supplies specifically. Uh, and those inbound Ocean, ocean shipments. And they use Project 44 for the real time. And then with Everstream, we have that, uh, that, you know, continuous, you know, future risk scoring and a risk adjusted ETS on the shipments.
And so there’s some numbers at the bottom of what our customers have shared with us. Of course, you know, chasing shipments and information, we remove a lot of that, so that saves time, and that time that saved is time that you’re already using on mitigation. So that’s a very important part of that. I. And then of course we contribute to, we can’t claim all the credit, but it’s part of, of us raising the alert early enough or finding what’s relevant, um, where they can prioritize to improve on time performance and reduce those expedited costs.
And with that, you know, protect from freeze that temperature controlled, um, capabilities use case I mentioned then it’s not just saving costs, but you’re also saving CO2. So it’s a, a win-win for everybody on that. I think my final example is, um, regarding a global automotive tier one, and just another example about being aware of an issue and its impact as early as possible so that you can make a decision faster than the competition.
Right. So in this case, the supplier had an, you know, I immediate notification of the Red Sea disruptions last year. Right on the day the crisis started and the first step was, Hey, we’ve got to reroute. We know what’s in in transit. We know what’s planned. We know what’s already passed, you know, passed through and we don’t have to worry about.
But, um, they also immediately created a task force to really determine, I. You know, it can, they shift and in this case it was looking at a shift to, um, to rail and if that would be possible, you know, going the China Russia Polish route into Europe. And they needed to do this to, you know, not have any production time down, uh, damage or production stoppage, which they estimated would’ve occurred, incurred like $1 million per month loss.
Had they not been able to, uh, to move that over to rail. The rail was faster, cost more, but they, you know, in the end they say, Hey, it’s cost neutral, because we’ve got faster turnover of moving things, uh, on that route. So now we’ll go through a short demonstration, or I would say just a look and feel of the Everstream platform, and then take some questions.
All right, so here I’m in, in Everstream Analytics. I’m going to start on a map and we say we map a supply chain. So what does that mean? It means we’re putting, you know, putting points all over on a map, right? And for these different points, then some of that other information could be related. So I’ll grab, uh, a location here called Board Tech Electronics, and I can see the location has some particular risk right now with power outage, but I’m concerned about the transportation lanes.
In this case, I’ve got three transportation lanes going to my manufacturing in Poland, coming out of Thailand, sorry, out of Taiwan. And you’ll see some of these have, uh, you know, quite a bit of risk. So we’re looking at the actual kilometers of risk. And one just has, has a little bit. And one of these is a reroute, right?
So if we kind of take a, take a look at the routes, you know, this is the one going through the red seat, not a, not a big surprise of the, of that. And then I’ve, you know. I’ve negotiated and have a reroute, which is going around the, going around the cape. Now, in this case, they’re saying, Hey, it’s still red. And on my, you know, my 15 day, hour by hour, uh, uh, risk. And this is related to, you know, to a, uh, uh, some Chinese military drills, right? So that’s impacting just this little portion of that transportation lane as an example. Okay. So these are all real, all data that we’re looking at is real. These are real events that are happening.
I can see I have a, you know, a, a minor, minor earthquake. I’ve got some, we vessel times, a little bit of delays at the port of Cape Town right on my, on my path over to finally get over to, uh, my manufacturing plant in Poland. And I’ve got a, you know, tropical, tropical CYS storm that, uh, could impact China.
But that one is actually winding down now. Okay, so,that’s been mapped in, right? Then we can also be looking at these, these incidents that Everstream is, is reporting on, uh, oh, they just showed up, right? So in this case, I’m showing the impact area of that tropical storm. So it’s a truly global solution covering all of these logistics topics and, and others.
But if I, you know, zoom out of the, um, zoom out of the map. Just to give you a view, right? There’s stuff happening all over the globe, and so I can see a vessel waiting times at 1.5 days here, et cetera. So that’s the concept we monitor. We can understand and we can map. Now, if we look at, um, at it at a higher level, then as incidents are occurring, and we’ve got, we’ve been doing this for many, many years and, and there’s a lot of things going on, but we’re breaking all of this down into specifics.
So if I look at this. Ground transportation section. Then within ground transportation, I’m seeing, you know, road work closures as the biggest percentage train accidents and derailments. Now you can further analyze and break down by country. I can look at how many of these have impacted my network or impacted my, my transportation lanes over time.
So there’s a lot of ways to get a view of the types of, uh, risks, which could be coming. The next thing I, I wanted to show is, uh, here’s a example of our port dashboard. So we have daily updates. Right now I’m looking at focusing on some ports from in China and just showing you, you know, a view of some of the, some of the data that we have, which can help project into the future, you know, what the potential issues are, whether I’m looking at it from a vessel wait time at Anchorage, right?
Or I could be looking at the ports themselves and looking at dwell time and deviations and for all of this, right, there’s a lot of statistics over time, which can also be leveraged and also exported from Everstream for further analysis. So this kind of information could be very useful in planning, of course.
So let’s go back, I’m gonna go back to, um, to our friend that we were looking at earlier. Um, board tech. So I just want to jump back to my, to my supplier here, who had those, those, those lanes, right. So if I take a, take a look at this, then in terms of each of these lanes may have shipments on them, right?
So we’re able to not just have a lane, but also be able to look at a, at a particular shipment. So for example, I’ve got one on, on the reroute, so I’ll drill drill into this one for now. And if I look at this now from a shipment perspective. Alright. Then I can say, all right, well on this, on this lane right here, I’ve got a single, a single shipment.And you see the, the shipment doesn’t have the full risk of the of the lane because we’re looking at it from a time perspective. It’s only picking up the port of Cape Town because if I look at the details of the shipment, right, then we’re actually looking at planned arrivals and planned departures, actual arrivals, actual departure milestones.
So we know, right, that on this shipment that it’s already, it’s already finished this first path from this going to the port, and now we’re just risk assessing it for the future. So it’s already made it through, right? But if I, you know, go back and, and look at one of those other shipments, uh, in terms of, uh, in terms of board tech or one or the non, uh, the, the lane that goes around. Through the Red Sea, and these of course, are, are, uh, very risky. And just like the other, we’ve got the timeline on those, et cetera. So I can see, you know, what, what risk in my past, what risk is it into my future, or I’m looking at where, when will I expect to be hitting that waterway closure. It’s ’cause I’m sailing right now and we expect it to be in the red, the red sea zone at this time on on July, uh, on the 11th. And it will escape and be out of that zone by the 15th or 16th. So it’s very detailed, hour by hour view of risk. So I’m going to take a pause here, Francie, and if we can address any questions, that would be great.
Franziska Nothofer: Yes. Perfect. Thanks Jason for walking us through the different logistics risk, best practices, and the demo. We’ve meanwhile had a few audience questions come in, so let’s jump into the first one right away. Do we need a lot of internal data to get started or can we use your external data first?
Jason Flake: Um, the, the answer is no. You don’t need a lot of data to get started. And you can also leverage a lot of our data, right? ‘Cause we have, you know, master, master, uh, databases of, you know, the, the ports and airports, rail terminals, et cetera, that you can use to get started. And in terms of looking at, you know, these logistics paths or lanes, all we really need are, we need locations. It could be just, you know, point to point or multi, multi move. And we need to know what mode. Because within, right, within our, our solution we have, you know, the sailing paths already mapped. We have a lot of details, um, you know, when we get down, down in the details of the network and all the road networks as well. So it’s just giving us a bunch of points and then giving us the mode and we can be monitoring your logistics lanes.
Franziska Nothofer: Perfect. Thanks Jason. Okay, now let’s move on to the second question. Diving deeper on the data, uh, what types of intelligence feed into the platform? How do we know it’s trustworthy and up to date?
Jason Flake: Uh, good question and uh, common question as well. Uh, there are many different sources, so we could go through a long list, but,we think of any type of international news media, local news, media, et cetera. We use a a lot of big, you know, big data AI approaches to find supply chain and logistics relevant, specific, uh, issues that are occurring. Um, but we don’t rely only on that ai. The ai, think of it as a filter, which takes the important things for supply chain out of all of the sources that we have, including our link to DHL, including our meteorology team, including, uh, data that we buy.
As well that I won’t disclose fully. And then we have human intelligence. So we have, uh, put a lot of, a lot of, uh, focus on the human intelligence. We call them intelligence solutions. They sit across the globe. They can further validate and enhance the information coming out of the ai, uh, such that before it hits the platform, a human has looked at it, unless it’s something like a natural disaster or an earthquake that, um, you know, the, you know, from the source, we know it’s know, it’s actually there. So we do vet everything, uh, to, to make it as, uh, relevant, as trustworthy as possible. No fake news.
Franziska Nothofer: Perfect.Thanks Jason. That was a great answer and really emphasizes the fact that, um, there won’t be too much alert noise, but it will really be filtered through human intelligence before it reaches, um, the user. Thank you. Okay. I’m just conscious of time right now so we can cover one last question before we wrap things up for today. You mentioned time savings and reduced expedited freight costs. How do those improvements typically show up for your customers?
Jason Flake: Well, as I said earlier, I, you know, we, we can’t be claiming, you know, that only everstream. So it’s really, it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be combined, uh, in with the current processes. So whatever processes you’re doing today, I. We are en, we are enhancing those, right? So if, if you can measure, you know, how much you’ve had to expedite, then the, with Everstream, I think then that, that’s a key contributor.’cause we’re giving earlier warning so you can make those decisions and actually quantify it in terms of, you know, lead time performance, et cetera. That’s only if you can really ingest that risk into your planning process. Um, you know, you might have, you know, great optimization, but if it’s not aware of something which is happening, then it’s gonna be making a wrong decision.
So think of it as it’s, it’s making itself available to the customer by improving the current processes and planning systems that they already have today. Right? ’cause we are not a planning system.
Franziska Nothofer: Perfect. Thank you. Alright, thanks Jason for sharing the insights and showing the platform in action. And thank you to our attendees for being here with us today.
We’ll follow up on the remaining questions. We couldn’t get to one-on-one. And um, yeah. Now that wraps up today’s session. If you’d like to get in touch with our experts directly, please email us at [email protected] and you will also receive the recording via email shortly. Thanks again and have a great day and goodbye.
Jason Flake: Thanks everyone.
