Anne:
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining our session today, which is part of our Supply Chain Optimization series. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping notes, all attendees on mute seat, but please send any questions using the Q&A box on the side of your screen. Please close any extra windows to prevent buffering, and we are recording the webinar, 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 Roy Van Montford, a senior solutions consultant at Everstream. For our agenda today, Roy, will be discussing how to initiate responses after incidents. We will then take any questions now I’ll turn it over to Roy. Thank you.
Roy:
Perfect. Thank you very much Anne. So, welcome everybody. As mentioned by Anne, my name is Roy Van Montford. I’m a senior solutions consultant with Everstream Analytics. I have been with the company for nearly four years now and more than 25 years of experience in supply chain logistics, etcetera. So, what we want to talk about today is basically how to initiate a response or a mitigation plan. After that, an incident as we call it, has occurred. So, an incident affecting your supply chain. So, if we talk about incidents, then the question is of course, okay, what is it we are talking about? So, there are many different S and different use cases, different scenarios that actually can impact potentially your supply chain. And if we talk about supply chain, the common methodology, what is being used in the market is that we are looking at suppliers primarily.
But if you take a look at for instance, these different risk categories, whatever Everstream, as an example offers, then you can see it’s quite a lot what you can be impacted by. And I think if you choose a solution to work with in order to be able to monitor risk management, then it’s important to understand what are those categories.
The categories. What we are looking over here are basically sort of faced into different four core areas, Plan, Source, Make, Deliver, and for everybody on the call, that should be a recognizable thing. And of course there is overlap in certain areas. So, we have risk categories that fall in plan that could fall into source and that are a make that could affect the level. So, it’s like an ongoing thing, but the most important thing is that there’s quite some risk out there which potentially can jeopardize your supply chain operations.
And if we talk about supply chain operations, it’s not only what you are sourcing from your supplier, not only about the procurement processes. But you should also be able to monitor your warehouses, your distribution centers, your manufacturing production plans, etcetera, your logistics service providers, your logistics routes, all of that. And a single platform that would of course be ultimate and able to be seeing this in a solution and actually being notified about it that you can act on it accordingly. And when I say act on it accordingly, that’s about the whole subject matter of today’s webinar. So how do you initiate a response? How do you mitigate a certain event or a certain incident?
Now if we talk about an incident, it’s relatively important to understand what is the journey of an incident. And if we take a look within the Everstream backend, so to say, then what are we looking at on the screen right now is basically that we gather information, whether this is true web calling technology, whether this is coming from paid sources, whether this is coming from people, whether this is coming from partners.
So that’s sort of the subject matter from Everstream Analytics. How do we find this information is the very first question. And then next to it is it’s going through a validation process. And on the next slide we are going to show you a little bit more on that validation process. Why am I showing you this? An incident is all about relevancy. So, if we identify a certain risk within the supply chain, the big question then is, is it relevant to my supply chain? And when I say my supply chain, it’s from an everstream customer point of view. So, the people in the audience today, you should ask yourself if an incident is found, is that actually affecting my supply chain? So, there’s a lot of stuff happening in the world. And the big question of course then is am I affected by that yes or no?
And if we take a look at this particular slide, you can sort see, okay, there is of course an identification of an incident and then it goes to a process. And that process is quite important to understand for everybody because if you need to truly initiate a response or start working on the mitigation plan or if you have a BCM, a business continuity management plan in place within your organization, then the question of course, is this relevant first of all? And if it is relevant, how did they come to it? Why is that relevant? And it’s all about the basics. It’s all about the starting point, the identification of an incident. Because the last thing, what we as everstream analytics want to avoid is actually that you are constantly working through emails or API notifications or dashboards where incidents are not relevant to your supply chain.
That’s creating more time on your side, which is not relevant. So, relevance is the key word in this particular case. And if you take a look at how do we do this, we have on the left hand side we have a team of analysts that basically is a 24/7 process throughout the entire year that basically monitors everything, what we detect, what we identify, what we find, and we turn that into an incident which is supply chain relevant. So those are the key criteria and that is going to be published into our solutions towards our customers. And then our solution functionality basically matches if this is relevant to your particular supply chain. And we’ll come a little bit later to what does that actually mean, my supply chain? But as a starting point, think about your suppliers as an example, your supplier locations, think about your warehouses, think about your manufacturing plants as I just mentioned.
So, think about the participants and your supply chain which you would like to monitor for risk. And if something is identified, then the big question of course is what do I need to do now? Because if we take a look at this particular slide, which is sort of more of a similar to the previous slide, but more of a flow on and a breakdown of how do we identify risk? Where we start on the left-hand side talking about data sources. And data sources can be anything, right? So, we’ve got algorithms built that screen, the web for certain conditions, we buy data, we have people, we have partner data as I mentioned on the previous slide. And all of that we consider as data sources. So quite often we get the question, what are your data sources? And we can’t provide a list simply with the data sources because it can be virtually anything.
But if we have those data sources where we have identified risk, then it goes into an internal process on our side and the AI matching and filtering conjunctions into the human validation and analysis. The piece which is right in the middle of the screen right now where it says human intelligence on top, that is a very important piece because this ties into our relevance area, our people who are validating, complimenting, correcting all the information we find primarily to technology. They are responsible for publishing what we call incidents into the solution. And once those incidents are published, our solution and takes a look at, hey, is our customer impacted by that particular incident? And that’s quite an important piece because you don’t want to go through 20 emails around the same subject matter, you want to have a single email as an example. And that could be a real-time email, that could be a daily summary, that could be a weekly summary.
It could be an API, it could be a dashboard, it could be a view within the solution. It’s really up to you how you would like to be informed or notified about “something is impacting my supply chain network”. And that human validation as mentioned, they add as an example industry information. So, is this automotive relevant as an example, is the food and beverage relevant as an example? They add also information about if there are any organizational structures in place, right? So, is there a mother company in place? So, we really try to provide you with the most information but also most accurate and validated information. Once that is done, we publish it, which is the incident published. It’s the fourth from the left, second from the right, and then the solution functionality sort of kicks in. Now why am I explaining to you how do we get incidents, etcetera?
I already mentioned relevance, but for you it’s very important with regards to the subject matter of today’s webinar. In order to understand, okay, so we have identified an incident, the solution as an example is saying, now we need to take action. So how are you going to do that? And there are again, different methodologies and it really depends on your procedures, your IT landscape, your organizational structure on your side. But the Everstream solution of course provides the flexibility to adhere to that. But if we take a look at the right-hand side where it says incident workflows, you see a lot of criteria over there which are important to understand. So, everything is sort of configurable to tweak it to your specific risk profile. So, we’ve talked about scoring rules, we have different profiles, we have different ways of alerting, digest, we have dashboards we can integrate into different solutions through webhooks or even API as FDP, etcetera.
We also provide functionality, what we call feedback loop and action plans. And those last two are actually important for today’s session. So a feedback loop is basically where if you have identified an incident, or the solution basically I should say, has identified an incident. Then the solution can be set up in such a way that automatically a little notification goes out to example given your supplier and that supplier then needs to respond to it. Or you can say, I’m going to run an action plan, a mitigation plan, depending on the terminology you are used to of course. And that’s also why it says tailored alert, notifications, triage and actions. So, the solution, what we offer is not only about identifying a certain risk which potentially jeopardizes your supply chain, it’s also about the follow-up of course, and that’s basically where today’s subject matter for the webinar is all about.
Now, if we take a look at how do you manage this from your point of view, let’s say you are an Everstream customer. So, all the four pieces on the left-hand side, the millions of sources, the matching and filtering, the human validations and the publication that’s fully managed through, that’s part of our subscription towards our customers. And then we need to set up your individual environment in order to tailor it to your specific requirements, nice or have needs etcetera.
That’s to the tail of alert, notifications, triage, and actions. Now if we would take a view at how would that work in a day-to-day operation as an example, then we can see for instance that if we start on the left-hand side, what we typically see is that our customers, they receive alerts and as mentioned, an alert could be through an email notification, it could be real time, it could be once a day, it could be weekly APIs going into your IT landscape.
You can log into the solution; you can build your own views in order to see what’s relevant for me. You can take a look at dashboards. So, there are a lot of possibilities about how are you being informed about a certain incident happening affecting potentially your supply chain. So that’s the first box on the left-hand side. Now if you have identified a certain incident where basically the solution tells you this particular location facility like a supplier, like a warehouse is being potentially impacted, then of course you need to understand is this actually the case, yes or no?
So that’s what we call review internally. So, you actually deep dive into the incident details. We of course provide a lot of incident details as I just mentioned on the previous slide. We add information manually to our incidents, but we also as an example, provide a link to the original source where we found the incident or to the main source I should say, because you have incidents that are published on multiple websites.
So, you’ve got duplicate or multiple sources. So, one of the things, what we also do on our side, is we de-duplicate information. So again, that you don’t get notified like 20, 30, 40, 50 times about the same incident. So that’s all handled within the solution through setup and configuration. But now if you have identified it, and you need to take actually an action, to initiate the response, you need also have the tools in order to be able to do so. So, think about you can simply start sharing the incident with teammates. You can set up feedback requests in order to see if for example, given a supplier truly is impacted, you can set up a mitigation plan in order to follow a certain procedure that is supported by what we call playbooks. So that’s all on the third and fourth blue block on the right-hand side, request feedback plan mitigation, and there’s no particular order to it.
This is the most logical order. But of course, really depending on how you are set up, how does your organization look like? How is it structured, what are your procedures, etcetera. That could be the other way around. It could be a mixture, etcetera, etcetera. The essential message over here is that we provide a solution that is actually ready and able to cope with your requests. So, this is an important thing to understand and when I say request feedback, that might need a little bit of iteration feedback internally, like an everstream terminology request feedback. And as I just mentioned, it basically is a mechanism where you can either manually but also through automated workflows trigger like a level mini questionnaire to go out to your initial contact or your supplier to the person who’s responsible for providing you information in order to understand, okay, we have identified an incident, are we impacted by yes or no?
So, if you think about internal feedback requests, that could be a product manager, a category manager, sourcing responsible manager, etcetera. But you also have the possibility from within the Everstream solution to say, “Hey, I want to send this directly to my contact at my supplier”, as an example, right? Sending it to a supplier contact is always a little bit more challenging because there is no mechanism that guarantees you will get a response. You can monitor it to within the solution, but the guarantee is not there. But you do need to have that feature or functionalities available. Of course, think about it as like a survey, a questionnaire solution, but this is fully automatically triggered by the system. It can be set up accordingly depending on severity, depending on risk category, etcetera. If there is flooding, it should go to the East Asia region for a certain product category, then it should go to a certain personal department within your company.
That’s how we can set it up as such. But you also have, as it says on the right-hand side plan mitigation the possibility to actually create mitigation plans. And mitigation plans are supported by what we call internally, playbooks. Within the Everstream terminology, it’s called a playbook. And a playbook is basically the steps to take in case a certain type of risk occurs. So, let’s think about as an example an insolvency. The solution has identified an insolvency and that insolvency matches a certain supplier, a tier one supplier as an example. It also could be a tier two or tier three supplier, but it matches a participant in your supply chain. Now you’ve got an early warning system where you immediately can take action. And you don’t need to think about “What are the steps I need to take?” That’s what we call a playbook. We, in conjunction with your good self, will set up a step-by-step action plan, a playbook in order to understand who is responsible for this task and in which timeframe does that need to happen.
So that’s a very crucial thing. Because if you take commonly a look into the market, there are a lot of solutions out there of course, but you also need to be supported by executional tasks. So, you don’t only need to be informed. If you have a Center of Excellence in place, you would like to have a system in place that actually supports your processes. So that’s like a plan mitigation piece. And having said that, right, so let’s take a look at how does this actually look. So, we’re going to log into a standard demo box and in that demo box we’ve got incidents, events available of course, and which tie into some demo data of ourselves. So, if I would stop sharing my presentation and if I would hand over to the solution, then if I would be a user and I would lock into the solution, this sort of would be my start screen so to say, right?
The question always is if we talk about the day of a life, how you would get a notification. So, we would get an email, or you would get an email that says, “Hey, we have identified a risk which is categorized as financial health.” It is in this particular case categorized as moderate. And there’s a little description about, okay, so what is this all about? And I have taken deliberately a very straightforward simple example in order for everybody to understand, “ Hey, how would that tie into my daily operations?” Because that’s important to understand. So, what you could do from this particular incident, you could navigate to that incident. And when you navigate to that incident from the email itself, it would open up the screen, it would directly bring you to that particular incident and it would tell you what facility is potentially impacted and we can disregard to the severity at this moment. It doesn’t matter if this is a low medium or a high score, the key question is we are potentially impacted by this. So, what do I need to do now? How do I initiate the response and follow up of this particular incident?
And the very first thing is relevancy. So, we talk about how do we know this is relevant and this is where the Everstream solution kicks in. So we essentially take your data, your supply chain data, we sort of create a digital twin and we then put rules on top of that digital twin in order for the solution to understand what are the criteria I should be looking for when it comes to supply chain risk management? Because you as customer A might have different requirements versus customer B, and that’s quite important to understand that you can tailor it to your specific needs. But to keep it simple, we’ve got an incident over here, very straightforward that is about reducing employee working hours at a particular site in Germany. And we have set up what we call a facility name. And you can see in the middle that facility name is of a certain type, which in this particular case is a supplier.
And the very first thing, what you can do now is you now can take a look at, okay, what am I sourcing as an example from this particular supplier? So, you could take a look at your particular material flow as an example. And in this particular case we are sourcing a connected mobility device which goes into a generic auto mobile model. We can add the value of product. So, this is information that typically comes from the customer. Please bear in mind this is demo data. This is mockup data of course, but we do have a facility from a live event and we have added some mockup or dummy materials and products for demonstration purposes of course with I value.
So, in order to understand first of all, what am I sourcing over here, which is important, but why am I explaining this to you? So, think about this scenario that this particular material, what you are sourcing from example, given the robot bus facility, think about the scenario that you couldn’t source this from anywhere else. So, what do you do when you ask that question at that moment? It’s basically too late. So you need to be prepared. So, you need to have a BCM, a business continuity management plan in place. You also need to be able to talk example given to your specific suppliers in order again to be prepared. But we never can predict truly what is going to happen at a company. So, this is an early warning system because if you take a look at the start date based on the information we have, this is going to start or going to happen as per of the 1st of January, 2026.
Now I deliberately took this one in order for you to show from live data that we actually have the possibility to turn this into useful information within the solution. And that’s a quite important piece to understand because if you now need to understand, alright, we have identified a reduction of employee working hours at a particular site, is this going to impact for instance the product delivery which we are sourcing or the material delivery or the skew delivery or the item delivery depending on the terminology you’re used to, but is this going to impact our particular plan? And for that you can request feedback so you can set up particular companies or particular names, particular departments, etcetera. And in this particular case, I’m going to request from information from a person called RVMI can change everything. I can say request feedback, and now the information is sent out.
Now I would typically get an email into my email inbox when I’m the recipient and I could then respond to that particular feedback week pass, so to say. So just to give you an example of how that would look. So, we’ve got a real time message over here. You can see the timestamp, and this is an example of how it could be done, but in this particular case I would say no little to no impact and it would give you a little questionnaire of how that would work. So, we are still on 100% capacity. We might have a one-day delay and we think well within one week we are fully up and running over here and we will say all good from a supplier point of view and we will send the feedback once the feedback is sent as being processed into the solution.
And once it is being processed into the solution, you would also be able to actually see that feedback once it is processed into the solution. So, this is a little bit the audience of how feedbacks would work and how mitigation plans would work. And the other thing is you can create a plan, and I created a plan of front over here where you can have predefined tasks, remember the playbooks I explained in order to understand how would that work? And the tasks are basically there, get information from the supplier, do I need to triage, do I need to share the incident? It really depends on the supply chain category, but in this particular case it’s a simple example of getting a playbook in place and assigning automatically people who are responsible for certain tasks and then have them obviously respond to that and follow up.
That also can be managed through analytics. And if we talk about the analytics, then of course this is to give you a helicopter view on who is responsible for what kind of particular scenario, what kind of action, etcetera. It really comes with plans with owners, with detailed tasks, etcetera, etcetera. So, in this particular case we’ve got 106 plans, 34 active, and you also can use that for your analysis of course. So having said that and considering time, this is a little bit of information which is hopefully valuable to you in order to understand how a mitigation plan would actually work within a solution like Everstream.
So having said it, we can hand over back to the particular Q&A session. And Anne, did we get any questions if I may ask?
Anne:
We did indeed, Roy. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of time, but let’s try and get through as many as we can.
Roy:
Yeah.
Anne:
First one, how do you prioritize risks on multiple incidents occur simultaneously across different regions?
Roy:
Right. I would say the most important thing is you start triaging and have the right tools in place that basically identify the severity of an incident. So that’s an important key material to understand and if you talk about those kind of questions which are sort of more global, then really important is to map your own supply chain network into a risk management solution and for the solution to understand how crucial is that supplier in your supply chain. That’s absolutely key. So, what is the relative severity you need to ask yourself and have that in conjunction with a solution?
Anne:
Thanks Roy. Sure. Next question. How can companies better prepare for cascading risks such as the power outage leading to production, stoppages and delayed shipments?
Roy:
Yeah, absolutely. So again, it’s all about the solutions and the workflows and the processes you have in place. But get a decent solution in place that truly supports your contingency and your mitigation plans. We just went through a little bit of feedback, we just went through a mitigation plan and we also see that customers often have a center of excellence or we can support our customers in building a center of excellence that is actually managing this. But it really depends on what kinds of category do we have. In this particular case, it was about a power outage I think. So, leading to production stoppages, a power outage is really hard to predict, if I may use that word. But if we get our hands on that kind of information and we truly can see if that impacts your supply chain, that’s the very first step to start with I would say.
Anne:
So essentially Roy, what you’re saying is once you have the information earlier, even if you can’t predict that, you are better prepared with an early warning.
Roy:
Yes, absolutely. Early warning, absolutely.
Anne:
I think that’s all we’ve got time for. Thank you very much for those insights. Roy. As we’re wrapping up the session, just a reminder, we will be sending out the recording of the webinar and if you have any further questions, please reach out to us at info@everstream ai. Thank you very much everybody.
Roy:
Thank you very much everybody.