Everstream Analytics Supply Chain Risk Management Solution Overview – January 2023
In this Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis, we give an overview of Everstream Analytics, a Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) solution built to provide customers with a visibility into supply chain risks that is both end-to-end and multi-tier. The company achieves this by using an advanced Al paired with real-world, in-the-moment perspectives from a proprietary network of partners that deliver insights down to the bill of material level.
The last few years have put the word “supply chain” in the headlines as so-called supply chain disruptions and shortages have impacted everybody. The impact of Covid-19 on demand, the opening and closing of borders, factories and ports, the obstruction of the Suez Canal and the war in Ukraine have created a nightmare for supply chain and procurement professionals. Even now, supply chains are far from being “back to normal.” The root causes for these disruptions haven’t disappeared, and climate-related incidents are increasing and will continue to do so until GHG emissions are under control.
Even if logistics teams are more responsible for operational fulfillment, procurement still has a massive impact on it in terms of the initial design of the supply network (Design For Supply) and in the contracting of conditions (prices, Incoterm, MOQ, etc.). Also, the performance of the fulfillment process is a critical input to the continuous optimization of the supply/supplier base. Therefore, creating a digital twin of a supply chain to identify, mitigate and monitor risks at all times is of ever-increasing importance for organizations that want to risk-adjust their supply chain. This is precisely the value proposition of Everstream Analytics, a provider with over 15 years of experience in the field and unique proprietary technology.
This Vendor Analysis provides an overview of Everstream Analytics, a look at the competitive landscape, selection tips and an analyst summary.
Here’s why Everstream Analytics matters:
- To the market — Everstream Analytics’ AI-powered digital twin technology provides a deep and granular risk-monitoring solution that stands out from competitors for its proprietary technology and amount of historical and new data.
- To customers — Everstream Analytics has collected over 3 trillion data points over the last 10 years and processes 8 million sources daily, enabling exceptional risk and predictive analytics for customers.
- To potential buyers — Everstream Analytics is able to monitor and map n-tier suppliers, providing an in-depth look into its customers’ risk.
Quick Facts: Everstream Analytics
✓Customers: Andritz, Bayer, Danfoss, Dupont, Google, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Medtronic, Unilever, Whirlpool, AB InBev, BP, DHL, FairPrice, Applied Metrics
✓ Funding/investors: Columbia Capital, Stepstone Group Inc., Blue Lagoon, DHL, Morgan Stanley
✓ Regions covered: global
✓ Industries covered: automotive, life sciences, chemicals, medical devices, food and beverage, oil and gas, heavy equipment, retail, high-tech, industrial manufacturing
✓ Partners:
- Technology: SAP, Infor, BlueYonder, kinaxis, Oracle
- Consulting: Accenture, Bain & Company, Deloitte
- Associations: HIRC, semi, American Logistics Aid Network
- Logistics: DHL
✓ Integrations: ERPs, TMS (see tech partners above) and SRMs (QAD Allocations, Synertrade) and Supply Chain Planning Systems (SAP, IBM, and Kinaxis)
✓ Financial: CreditSafe, RapidRatings, D&B
✓ ESG: D&B
✓ Planned: EcoVadis, Maplecroft, Bureau Van Dyke
✓ Website: www.everstream.ai
Company background
Everstream Analytics is the result of the merger of two leading risk analytics solutions: Riskpulse and Resilience360. Riskpulse was founded in 2019 as a spin-out from the Climate Research Division at the University of California, San Diego. In 2015, it merged with EarthRisk to enhance its weather-prediction capabilities.
DHL incubated Resilience360 in its Global Innovation Center in 2012 to be an end-to-end supply chain risk assessment and monitoring solution. It received additional funding ($21 million from Columbia Capital) in 2018 and became an independently operated company under the management of Rising Tide Digital.
In early 2020, following a new funding round ($22.7 million), Resilience360 announced the acquisition of Riskpulse. Both companies operated independently for a while, but the vision was to have a single brand and operating structure. That became a reality in 2021 when the two legacy solutions unified into a single platform called “Everstream Analytics.” The result is a global leader that operates in 11 countries and supports 22 languages.
DHL is still a minority shareholder, which allows Everstream Analytics to use DHL’s data but doesn’t prevent it from accessing and collecting the data of other logistics providers.
Solution Overview
Everstream Analytics’ solution is an AI-powered digital twin of a customer’s supply chain that serves several needs with specific modules to cover each need:
- Discover for supply chain transparency/mappings to discover sub-tiers and understand relationships at a granular level (product, part and material).
- Explore for supplier risk and risk mitigation.
- Reveal for the operational monitoring of events and risks at supplier, product, material or shipment level.
All capabilities and modules rely on a common architecture that focuses on data and analytics enabled by:
- Historical data, which features 3 trillion historical data points and includes 10 years of DHL’s data and has ETL capabilities to ingest new data from a huge number of sources. In addition to DHL, Everstream purchases trade data from various sources that have info on destination/origin and buyer/seller. Overall, Everstream processes (with NLP) 8 million sources daily (128 trillion data points, including weather-related data) and analyzes one million news and media articles every hour. It can also integrate with a customer’s systems, e.g., ERP/TMS for data on suppliers, materials and shipments.
- A network graph built by mining (attribute mapping, entity resolution, relationship data) collected data of more than 100 million trading relationships and more than 12 million suppliers that support, among other things, supplier and material discovery. With Discover, each customer gets access to a tailored customer knowledge graph.
- Risk modeling and scoring covering economic, environmental, sociopolitical, ethical, operational risk and compliance risks that are broken down into 30 different risk categories and sub-categories.
- Predictive analytics that use Everstream’s risk model and data trove to give a forward-looking view of potential risks and support preventive risk mitigation planning.
- Incident monitoring capabilities covering 220 countries and territories and 25 languages to deliver curated alerts in the application and by email that include recommendations for actions.
- Collaborative capabilities (called action center) to allow users to define and execute actions (mitigation or post-incident). Action plans can be created from scratch or available playbooks (templates).
In addition to technology-centric capabilities, Everstream Analytics has a team of 25 analysts worldwide who both provide 24/7 coverage on the latest trends, alerts and potential disruptions and continuously improve the AI/ML.
Discover (SC transparency)
After a customer has loaded its data (tier-1 suppliers, products/BoMs, materials, shipments, etc.), Everstream can enrich that data to surface tier-x suppliers. Because Everstream has a lot of granular data that constitutes the foundation for its network graph, it can provide discovery capabilities by mapping its data against the data of its customer. Sub-tier insights include, company name, location (including latitude and longitude because many visualizations in Everstream are map-based) and trading relationships with Harmonized System (HS) codes, product description and relationship confidence score.
Customers can also use the results produced by Everstream to edit or add links between companies.
It is important to note that the relationships between suppliers that Everstream shows to a customer are specific to the products, components, materials and raw materials they use. For example, a relationship between a tier 1 and a tier 2 is displayed ONLY IF the tier 1 buys something from the tier 2 that is included in what it sells to the buying organization that uses Everstream. To achieve this, Everstream relies on its granular data, customer’s product structures (BoMs), the expertise of its teams and on partnerships with particular experts in specific industries. This means the network view a user has in Everstream is supply-centric and, therefore, contextual and focused, as opposed to the entity-level relationships presented by other providers.
Everstream can also use its risk modeling and scoring capabilities to display and monitor sub-tier risks by overlaying these on the visual representation of a supply chain. A simple click on the node opens the related scorecard when a user wants to know
more about one of the companies in its supply chain.
Explore (supplier risk management)
Everstream’s Explore module is meant to support decision-making processes (supplier approvals/qualifications, sourcing, supplier development, etc.) with detailed deep risk assessments for any supplier in a customer’s supply chain, not just tier 1s. The risk modeling and scoring capabilities we already mentioned cover location, company and material. They are at the heart of Explore and enable customers to identify risks across 30 categories (the taxonomy of risk categories and subcategories comes out of the box) and to estimate risk exposure by defining weights for each component. Data comes from a variety of sources. Customers can even add their internal scores/KPIs.
The results are presented in a supplier’s scorecard that displays overall risks and breaks it down into external (natural disasters, sustainability, socio-political, etc.) and internal risks (financial health, cybersecurity, sub-tier risk, etc.) in a spider chart. A heatmap then goes into a more detailed categorization, showing child labor, worker rights, flood, etc. Customers have the ability to also add their own risk scores like supplier OTD performance or relationship strengths. The scorecard also shows how risks have evolved over time and benchmarks.
In addition, users have access to more detailed information on incidents and impacted lanes, shipments and materials. And, because Everstream has mapped a company’s supply chain at a granular level, these views allow users to view potential issues up the chain at material/product level and take action, e.g., view inbound flows for a tier 1 to find an alternative tier 2.
Action can be taken pre- or post-events when users identify risk at a supplier-level or an event happens at a supplier-level or en route (see “Reveal” below). As already mentioned, users can create ad-hoc action plans or use templates that are available out-of-the-box; the solution includes playbooks for specific situations or requirements. For example, Everstream has pre-configured dashboards for the German Lieferkettegesetz.
Actions can be tracked at different levels in the application and are aggregated in a view called “action center.“
Reveal (SCRM)
Reveal takes advantage of the capabilities of the other modules to present users with a network view of risks and events to cover operational use cases. The “my network” view displays all the network-specific incidents published or updated by Everstream Analytics over the last 24 hours in a customer’s supply chain, focusing on assets, lanes, shipments, materials and products.
Users can drill down into the specific details of an event to access deeper insights (supplier scorecard, news, etc.) and information like:
- Alternative suppliers
- Final product
- Material category
- Materials sourced
- Next-stage location
- Next-stage production
- Revenue and spend at risk
- ERP vendor code
The solution also offers real-time monitoring of the events and provides a forward-looking view (impacts and resolution time) when applicable. Reveal also includes deep tracking of goods in transit in the network to provide a health snapshot in terms of events and shipments. Users can view detailed shipment information at the container level to understand what will arrive early, punctually or late. Everstream uses data from logistics providers and port congestion data based on average time spent at each port to also give ETAs for containers.
Analyst summary
The solution has a vast database and collects more data points than most providers we have seen. It leverages proprietary data and capabilities to provide visibility and predictive analytics at all levels of a supply chain by considering business relationships (Tiers) and even the specific goods and services traded through those relationships (supply).
So, what’s our assessment for Everstream Analytics’ prospects?
The solution’s data- and AI-based approach to producing deep insights into entire supply chain networks avoids the typical “trickle down” methodology that relies on surveys that cascade down the supply chain. It tremendously reduces the time and effort required to map a supply chain and at a multi-tier level of visibility.
Everstream’s data and tech advantages deepen predictive capabilities in areas that other providers usually don’t cover. This is especially true for weather predictions (Everstream has a Chief Meteorologist Officer), which is of increasing importance for supply chain and procurement professionals because climate change is inducing more and more catastrophic events that organizations will have to factor into their decisions and network design.
Everstream understands and speaks “supply.” The data it has and the analysis it provides are granular and can be supply-centric and, therefore, contextual and focused. Other providers only offer entity-level relationships. This focus caters to the needs of
procurement teams and supply chain teams.
TECH REVIEW | © Spend Matters. All rights reserved.
