Franziska Nothofer:
Welcome to today’s Expert Ask Me Anything session on supply chain risk and resilience, which is also our last session of the 2025 supply chain optimization webinar series we’re running. I’m Franziska and I’ll be your host for the next 45 minutes today. Thanks so much for joining us. Now, before we get started, we have a few housekeeping notes. Today’s session is being recorded and we’ll share the recording out with you within the next 24 hours straight to your inbox. And all your attendee lines are currently on mute, but you can submit your questions anytime using the box at the top of your go-to webinar panel and we’ll keep an eye on any questions coming in throughout the session and add them into the discussion.
All right, now let’s dive in. Ahead of today’s Ask me anything, we asked you to vote on the biggest supply chain challenges you are preparing for in 2026, and the results are in the top. Two topics were tariffs and geopolitical risk, given the uncertainty throughout the year. And the second big topic is crisis management. No real surprises. They are right as these are really front and center for supply chain leaders right now in terms of format, today’s session is all about you. We’ll be putting your most pressing questions to our solutions consulting team, the experts who live and breathe this every day. And we’ll really talk about how to build resilience into your supply chain, how to anticipate and respond to disruptions faster, faster, and what leading organizations are already doing to stay prepared for whatever comes next. We’ll kick off with the tariff and geopolitics and crisis management topics, but throughout the session, please keep asking all your questions and they don’t have to be tied to those topics specifically.
This is really your chance to pick the brains of our experts. And with that, I’m excited to welcome our panel joining us from different continents today. First up we have Jason Flake joining us from Germany. We have Roy van Montfort joining us from the Netherlands and Greg Leary and Vin Ramundo dialing in from the US East coast. So a great mix to cover questions coming from our attendees across the globe. Alright, we’ve covered everything and we’re ready to go. So let’s dive right into our first question around tariffs and geopolitical risk. From a supply chain risk perspective, are we really seeing the end of globalization or just a major reset? And how do US and EU companies differ in how they’re regionalizing or multi shoring to manage risk?
Greg Leary:
I can take that one, Fran.
Franziska Nothofer:
Thank you.
Greg Leary:
Yeah, I don’t think we’re seeing the end of globalization or will we ever likely see the end of it. I think it’s companies just recalibrating to this ever-changing market dynamics that we’re seeing. Governments as well as companies have been caught off guard exposed by the events the last say five years going back to where COVID started and then geopolitical tensions, climate changes now tariffs and trade issues. So it goes on and on and we all know it takes years and years to establish new supply chains and capabilities in different parts of the world. So I think we will see companies continue to leverage their global connections with their established supply base, the talent, the resources there while they’re establishing more call it regional capabilities so that they can remain agile and pivot when needed quickly when the environment changes. And I do think technology plays a role in here too. So that’s what helps provide the visibility to the disruptive events that are going on around the world. It can also give you advanced warning to new and evolving issues. It allows you to do scenario planning for different situations that maybe you haven’t even contemplated yet so that you can be better prepared for them in the future. But yeah, I think it’s just a shifting adjusting to what’s going on in the world today.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you Greg. That was great, thank you. Alright, let’s move on to the next question geared around a topic that was covered in the news quite a bit recently. Commodities like rare earth and semiconductors are becoming political leverage. So how can supply chain leaders secure long-term access to these resources and how does ever stream’s data support that?
Roy van Montfort:
Yeah, I can take that one Franziska.
Franziska Nothofer:
Thank you!
Roy van Montfort:
You. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Critical commodities like this rare earth elements, semiconductors, lithium, cobalt, I think they have become really strategic assets and countries are using these as political and economic sort of leverage by imposing exports controls as an example. And that creates what I like to call sort of a concentrated supply risk, particularly in sectors like automotive, electronics and renewable energy. So long-term access, what everybody basically wants is tough and you need to sort of diversify sources that include multi-regional sourcing strategies I think. But also think about strategic partnerships that really depends on the industry we’re in and your position in the supply chain. And think of collaboration directly with example given miners refinance or ship manufacturers depending on again where you are. And I also do believe that investing in a sort of circle of supply by developing recycling and recognition programs, that is also something what we see popping up and where our companies are taking sort of measures in order to get those guarantees.
So if we then talk about the second part of the question, which I think was how can a solution like Everstream help with that? It’s by first of all creating an end-to-end risk visibility of your supply chain network including commodity monitoring as an example. And in this particular case specifically focused on geopolitical and trade risk data. I would say what companies using our solutions typically already do is they utilize supplier risk scorecards to evaluate the supplier’s financial health. There is G performance as an example, the country risk exposure. And last but not least, I think about scenario modeling to simulate the impact of example given geopolitical risk in order to quantify risk exposure. I think that’s sort of the tough challenge the companies have what we see, but this would be a good starting point I would say.
Vin Ramundo:
Yeah. Another thing I think Roy, it’s important to see too is the fact that we’re able to mine in the Sub-tier potential areas where you might have risk for rare earth minerals or even semiconductors. So what we see a lot of our customers do is analyze, okay, I know with my tier one supply base they might not need that, but if there’s three or four tiers down, there might be a potential risk there and be able to analyze and see that to really understand your overall exposure.
Roy van Montfort:
Yeah, absolutely. Which again is part of the real true end-to-end risk
Vin Ramundo:
Visibility. What gets measured gets managed, right? If you have visibility into this, you understand what your exposure is, then you can implement and run those scenarios and do those mitigation plans.
Roy van Montfort:
Totally agree.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you both. And Vin, I have another one for you talking around tariff volatility and you’re based in the US so that might be a good shot for you to take that one. What’s the most effective way to model or plan for shifting trade policies and duties through 2026 without losing cost efficiency?
Vin Ramundo:
Yeah, I mean I think a lot of the trade policies right now seem to be more negotiations, if that makes sense. It seems like there’s something new every day. So I think one of the big things that you need to do is again, be able to map your supply chain and understand where those potential risks are. Because today it could be rare earth minerals tomorrow, it could be semiconductors. I just read an article, we might not have Italian pasta in the United States because there’s going to be anti dumping duties on top of it. So the regulations are continuously changing and the more insight you have and the more visibility you have of your network, the easier when these things come out and you can actually identify what that potential risk is. So I think the first step is to again, map your supply chain so that you understand when a new regulation comes out or a new geopolitical event or anything happens, you’re able to quickly identify what’s the risk and then what are the alternatives and how do I solve that problem. Tariffs is just another example of the chaos that’s happening right now in the world is just because we are global, it is global. Anything that happens anywhere can affect you when you might not even realize it. So by having that visibility really kind of gives you the ability to quickly identify where your risks are and then how to solve those problems.
Greg Leary:
Then I think we’ll have to put out some new alerts if they run out of pasta in your neighborhood.
Vin Ramundo:
I know that’s not good for us, Northern New Jersey, we’ll be devastated by that disruption.
Franziska Nothofer:
Great insights there. Thanks Vin. And just another reminder, if you’ve got a question or a specific scenario you’d like to ask the team, just pop it in the questions box at the top for our joiners that just joined the session and we’ll then try to get to as many as we can and time is precious. So let’s move on to the
Jason Flake:
Next. Excuse me, I would like to volunteer for the next question. These guys keep jumping in, so whatever it is, throw it at me all.
Franziska Nothofer:
Got it. Okay, thanks Jason. This is actually, it’s a good one. So it’s around logistics challenges. How can logistics teams build resilience operations to pivot fast without sacrificing efficiency or customer commitments when trade routes and tariffs change overnight,
Jason Flake:
How the tariffs come back, it’s all tied together. I guess first I’d like to start, I would like to think about this from a perspective of shippers. So not logistics service providers. So the people who are making manufacturing and shipping things, and I think logistics teams for shippers, they have been and are used to building resilient logistics networks and operations for the past few decades. Historically, this has been done from maybe a perspective of cost and service levels as would be expected, but there’s also been more advanced design of a network, a logistics network, taking some risk into account. So that could be at a level of as simple as I don’t want to have all of my volume on a key trading lane committed or tied to a single transport provider or carrier. So I might want to break that commitment up 60, 40, 70 30, or have a policy of you have to have at least three options and two service levels, whatever it may be to help you adjust for the volatility where you might be having expanded volume at certain times or less at other times.
But I think from the Everstream perspective, all of that’s really in traditional logistics, network design and transportation planning. But now with the availability of programs or platforms like ours, so advanced supply chain risk management platforms, the operations and the logistics networks can be really designed and operated for increased resiliency and taking risk into account. So one example of that in logistics, you always have an existing logistics network. Some it might be ad hoc, some of it might be things that are unplanned for, but you have a solid static state that you’re working through, you have contracted rates, your service providers, you’ve got some recurring routes, whatever it may be, inbound, outbound, managed separately service levels that you rely upon ports of use. But business is always changing faster than you can redesign your logistics network. So you think of failures or changes in procurement, you have to be able to adjust for that on your inbound changes in your market and demand.
You have to adjust for that and also try to plan for it. But there’s also a lot of unforeseen events, which is where we really come in that you need to be able to have visibility of to monitor that network and not just the network, but also getting down to the shipment level so that you can at least be aware of what could be impacting your shipments. So you can mitigate, I would say, the impact of what that event could be, whether it’s a storm or a power outages, fuel outages, driver shortages, et cetera. But that’s just trying to take care of resilience on the existing network. But I would argue that the bigger pivot on logistics resilience is in the design itself and being able to take risk into that design at a more detailed level. There’s a lot more data and information which is readily available on strategic risk exposures from a geographical aspect, which is very important for logistics and also from a operational aspect based upon port statistics through time.
So all of that information. And also the availability now and visibility of historical events which have wreaked havoc on logistics networks, whether it’s war in the Red Sea or something in the Sue Canal Panama or storms in the ice storms. This information you can also be using and because it’s readily available, rather than redesigning the network once a year, maybe you can redesign it every quarter or every six months, taking some of that information into account. And so it’s not a total redesign, but you can make some strategic adjustments and to try to mitigate or even avoid some of those issues that you see in the existing network.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thanks Jason. Also for touching on some specific examples to share some context. Alright, loads of great points coming through and onto the next one. In one of your answers previously, I believe it was Greg or Roy, you touched on scenario planning. So this next question is about exactly that scenario planning sounds great in theory, but how do we make it actionable? What are the top two to three high impact risks that companies should be preparing for in 2026?
Greg Leary:
Yeah, I think that was me that mentioned it before. So I think what I see is that in order to do effective scenario planning, you first have to be planning for the right scenarios, things that would have a significant impact on your business, the ability to make your products, the ability to serve your customers, things that would have a detrimental effect on you if they should happen. So it could be things like where do you have high concentration of suppliers that are in risky areas or where are you single sourced? And you probably already know this information for your direct material suppliers, but what about their suppliers and their suppliers throughout that multi-tier supply chain? Your risk management system or whatever tools you’re using should ideally help you identify this type of choke points, help you keep you up to date on the new and emerging threats in the market so that you can then game plan for them to properly understand what impact they would have on you.
And to be able to do that, you then also have to be able to effectively represent your supply chain network. So it’s not just your locations but your supplier locations and their supplier locations, the transportation lanes that are connecting your suppliers with you and you to your customers. The logistics hubs that you’re using to bring materials in through and ship materials out through ports and airports and rail terminals, the materials that are being transported on those lanes and the products that they’re feeding so that you can understand the revenue at risk. So you need to be able to take all these different factors into account with the right types of scenarios in order to have that full comprehensive picture of what impact they might have on you. So then that allows you to plan ahead of time for these types of events. What are your mitigation strategies to resolve these events so that you’re just not caught reacting to them after the fact. And these plans need to be tested, they need to be kept up to date. It’s not a one and done kind of thing because as we’ve all been talking about, these risks are constantly shifting in and changing on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. So that’s the areas where I see people can normally improve in their scenario planning and put those in effect. And as I was talking so long, I forgot if there was a second part of the question.
Franziska Nothofer:
No, that was basically it. Thank you. Thank you, Greg. That was great. And side note, we actually had a webinar a few weeks back run by Greg on just the topic of scenario planning. So there are actual tangible insights with a platform demo on that as well. If you wanted to watch that back, you can find that on the website as well. So that might be a useful point to add here in this context. Alright, let’s move on to
Roy van Montfort:
The, I think there was also a question on the top three high impacts risk areas. So what we are expecting and IESG is a hot topic anyhow. So that’s something companies should prepare for weather climate, whether you like it or not, it’s impacting and from my personal point of view, I dunno how you feel, Greg, but that’s very, very, very actual and recent cyber attacks, et cetera, right? That companies, they disrupt so tremendously. I think that’s also something what companies should bear our mind and that’s a tough one to protect against, right? So yeah.
Greg Leary:
Yeah, I think definitely from my perspective, the conversations I’ve been having with customers, kind of the top of mind things or we’ve said it at least a dozen times already here, tariffs and trade impacts, climate seems to be more climate related issues, natural disasters becoming, it’s always been a supply major supply chain disruptor, but those seem to be happening more frequently now. And then the political risks companies are really trying to figure out ways to plan and insulate themselves from these risks. And I know everstream toward the end of the year, we always kind of publish our wrap up for the year and our forecast for the upcoming year. So I look forward to seeing that.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you for adding that. Okay,
Jason Flake:
I’d like to jump in, wait a second on this one too. We’ll draw this one out. It’s not necessarily about what are the top scenarios, but just because it’s been on top of mind for the, I don’t know for the past few days is sometimes you don’t know what those top scenarios are going to be, but something happens that says, Hey, that’s a new scenario for me. So an example right now, everyone might not know about it. I’ll explain a little bit, but next period is a company, a Dutch company. They are very big in the semiconductor business, primarily in automotive. And so what’s happened recently is the Dutch government has taken control of the company and the reason they did that has to, going back to our first topic of geopolitics, tariffs and all of that is that this company in Xperia is owned by a company wing tech technology in China.
And everyone’s, I’m sure you’re all familiar with sanctions on various companies and there’s the lists with sanctions. But the US said, hey, we’re going to expand our sanctions and not just say this company is sanctioned, which wing tech has been on the list since 2024, I believe, but their subsidiaries are also going to be sanctioned. And so the Dutch government saying, we got to do something because the US is going to sanction this. This is very important to our economy. And basically the US is saying, Hey, if next period doesn’t fire their CEO, then it’s going to be sanctioned. So the Dutch government comes in and we got it right, we’re going to stop that now. This then triggers China to say no way, a lot of next period’s manufacturing is in China. And so they said, well, we’ll just put an export control and block exports of Nexter products from China, which essentially kills the sales impacts all sorts of automotive companies.
So the OEMs and main suppliers have been running around the past few weeks trying to understand if they don’t have SubT tier visibility, do I have exposure asperia up in my supply chain and how could this impact me? So long story short, the scenario is now not in xperia, but I’ve never perhaps thought about that or is anyone in my main suppliers, are they actually subsidiaries of a Chinese company or another company in an area that may be sanctioned as part of all the ongoing trade wars? And tier one is a place to start, and maybe you’ve already done that and many have. But then when you get into sub-tier visibility, the question is like, is this key tier two which is supplying three of my tier ones, are they a subsidiary that would be in one of these hot countries? Perhaps these sanctions could expand to going on a tangent. It’s really about every year you don’t know what the scenarios are going to be next year. Some of them are the same or the same themes, but I would say the details are always changing.
Vin Ramundo:
Yeah, the bottom line, Jason, is that you need to map your sub tier, you need to map your network because we don’t have a crystal ball. No one does, and who would’ve thought before COVID that COVID would happen? But then after you need to understand how it affects you. So the more information you have when things are calm and that you map information and you map your supply chain, when a major disruption occurs, you can quickly identify and say, okay, what is the risk to my business? How do I set up mitigation strategy? And you want to do that before there’s an issue because when the issue happens, it’s too late. You want to be prepared because that first mover advantage if you’re able to see these things before anyone else or understand the impact before anyone else, that enables you to keep moving when your competitors don’t. And I think that’s the critical take is things are going to happen. That’s always the case, but really being able to measure and understand how these major disruptions affect you specifically is really the differentiation.
Jason Flake:
Great.
Franziska Nothofer:
Wonderful. Thank you all. Thank you. Okay, let’s move on to the next question. We have seen a lot of dedicated roles in supply chain risk management emerging across organizations. Do you foresee increase in such roles emerging in the next few years? What kind of skill set in cybersecurity and technology would be expected from such roles? Who would like to take that one?
Roy van Montfort:
Yeah, I can take that one. So yeah, it’s maybe a little bit more of an question, but it’s what we see, I’ll try to break it down into four or five categories, but what we see in other organizations typically is that there is a high increase in this and the skillset gets more diversified. So you talk about different categories within the cybersecurity, the IT space, talk about threat intelligence and risk assessment departments also in IT or cyber departments, incident response and business continuity, vulnerability management is really important. I think identity and access management IM is important. And last but not least, I would say cloud, overall cloud and API security, right? Do you manage your hosting environments on an AWS Azure or GCP security modules, et cetera. You need to have secure API gateway design in place, et cetera. If you talk about identity and access management, Okta, also Azure active directory, PAM solutions, zero trust architecture, you name it.
The message basically is that yes, there is a big increase and the skill sets required are expanding and it’s getting more and more, I wouldn’t say siloed, but there are going to be more independent or individual departments that focus for instance, on, as I mentioned, the first one, like threat intelligence and risk assessment that focuses on a whole different type of risk as we talk about today. But think about ISO 27,001 a TT, and ck, et cetera. So yeah, so that’s definitely an increase what we at least see with our customer base and the companies we speak to.
Franziska Nothofer:
Thank you Roy.
Greg Leary:
And maybe a few more. I mean, I hear maybe at least once or twice a week from companies we’re talking to. It’s like I don’t have a team, I don’t have a dedicated set of resources that can manage or run my risk program, which is fine. I don’t think that should scare companies away from starting on that journey. We see some companies take on a more kind of a hybrid approach where maybe there is one person, I’m your supply chain risk management expert, and they’re not necessarily skilled in all the areas that ROY just went through, but it’s a start and I think you it then you rely upon whatever technology you’re using to help you along. There are companies out there that do nothing financial risk or cyber risk or sustainability risk. You can leverage that data, bring it into a tool to get a more comprehensive view on risk and then engage the right people in your organization as needed. So maybe you’re the initial vetting point, and then you bring in your commodity managers, your supplier managers, your sustainability team, whatever that risk happens to pertain to your cyber team and let the people who know about it do it. But there definitely is, you can take a kind of a crawl, walk, run approach when you’re getting into a risk management program.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you both for taking that question. All right, now let’s dive into more tactical risk management and disruption management. How can teams quickly decide how to best manage risk during disruption and what data and best practice frameworks are there to most effectively combat that? Who would like to take this one? Ben, would you like to take that one?
Vin Ramundo:
Can you repeat it again? I’m sorry.
Franziska Nothofer:
Of course. How can teams quickly decide how to best manage risk during disruption and what data and best practice frameworks are most effective to combat that in that moment?
Vin Ramundo:
Yeah, I mean, one is to again, map the network so you understand the issue and then when you do see these potential disruptions, being able to quickly identify if this is actually going to affect your suppliers or even your customers. So having some type of mechanism to solicit feedback from a supplier is very important. Being able to kind of go and say, Hey, are you really effective? We see that there’s a flood, or we see that there’s potential power outage or a cyber attack. How effective are you? And then once that’s done, having mitigation plans within the system so that you have predefined playbooks so that when this type of disruption occurs, how do you manage that? How do you manage that so you have a different playbook for say a cyber attack versus a bankruptcy versus a major weather disaster, a natural disaster. So ultimately one, mapping the information, setting up frameworks to collaborate with your supply base, and then creating playbooks in plans so that when these things happen, you can kind of collaborate and manage the exceptions within the solutions.
Franziska Nothofer:
Okay, perfect. Thank you. Alright, let’s move on to the next question. Having visibility into your sub tier suppliers takes a lot of effort. Can you share an example or best practices when knowing tier two or three suppliers led to faster recovery during a crisis? Who would like to take that one?
Jason Flake:
I can jump on that one, but also just kind of bridging it from what VIN was just talking about, does there need to be a separate, I would say framework for tier disruption management? I don’t personally think so. I think you might have a different flavor of it, but it should still be the same framework just with different, I would say different tolerances and priorities. Do you guys agree with that? Yeah. Alright. So the question was about examples of where visibility gave us tangible value with something like that, right? Or recovery in a crisis. Yeah, there are quite a few examples we focus on. You can talk about it. There’s really different use cases where business continuity. I think if you’re talking about recovery, then that’s the use case. But there’s also use cases in compliance and sustainability is, we’re always saying ESG is always big.
And then also some of these scenarios that we talked about earlier used in next period. But business continuity, a real example, if you’ve made the effort to map the sub tier, then first of all, you really should be monitoring it because if you’re not monitoring it, then you just know what it is. Something happens and maybe your use case was something else. But if you’ve got that information, then you should be understanding when something is impacting any company in your sub tier. And also specifically locations. And I wanted make that distinction because mapping the sub tier, the goal should not just to be, Hey, we know that this company is in tier two or tier three and they’re a player for this type of material and they’re probably in this particular country or another. It should be about identifying if you can to the specific facilities that are feeding the next level in the supply chain all the way down your tier one and to you because that’s the level of detail that you need.
I would say to do an accurate assessment of what the potential impact is so that you can minimize that. So I’ll use a real example. One of our customers had, they’ve gone through some of the effort not to map the entire SubT tier network, but to focus on certain areas. And they had gone through the work, understood a lot of key tier two and tier three suppliers, and they received an alert from us regarding one of factory fire, which led us in production stoppage at a tier two in China. China’s seems to be every example today, but they received that alert the day after that fire. And in this case, they already knew by doing the mapping, which exact tier ones were impacted, and they had also mapped it down to their own manufacturing plants. So they said, Hey, if the supply really stops, we know exactly what’s coming from there, which tier ones are impacted, and therefore, which plants are impacted or would be potentially impacted.
So that’s a lot of work just to be able to tie that together. But they had all that done and that’s when the guys were talking about end to mapping. That’s what we do within the Everstream platform. But to really mitigate and understand, then it needs to trigger some other actions, right? And preferably these would be as automated as possible, but these proactively quantifying, for example, the number of purchase orders, the value of those purchase orders, that would be related to the tier ones that you have coming in, aligned with production plans or which sales orders might be impacted if production plans had to be changed or adjusted, looking at inventory. So I’d say classic supply chain planning and just looking at different alternatives.
Franziska Nothofer:
Your audio? Yeah, the audio is breaking up. Jason. Jason,
Franziska Nothofer:
Okay, there we go. Sorry, your audio was just breaking up. Yeah.
Franziska Nothofer:
Yeah, it’s been a bit buggy today, but yeah, you’re back. You’re back. That’s the most important.
Jason Flake:
That’s because I was being quiet. I’ll be super quick on the next ones. Yeah, we already talked about next period. I think that’s a very cool one, identifying ways to understand the challenges upstream for regulatory. The other regulatory example is any exposure to forced labor. So that’s classic example is the Uyghur Force Labor Protection Act out of the us, but there’s of course other regulatory rules on that not being part of any type of forced labor, but I’ll just keep this one short and sweet, is that it’s, I think probably everyone who’s on this call, their companies are saying, if you’re a manufacturer, then you’re saying, Hey, we don’t want to work, or not even a manufacturer, it doesn’t matter what you do, we don’t want to work with companies that engage in forced labor, slave labor, child labor, whatever it may be, right? Everybody does that and there’s definite value for that, right? It prevents potential fines. If you’re going against a regulation like the U Force Labor Protection Act, it prevents bad press and bad reputation. And in the case of U-F-L-P-A, if they seize your goods, that could cause production outages lost sales. So there can be tangible, but I think the intangible is also just as important. And so why not take that saying we don’t want any forced labor in our supply chain, take that upstream, take it up into tier two, into tier three, and if everybody does that, that’s a win for everyone.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you. Thanks Jason. Okay, brilliant. Let’s move on to the next one.
Greg Leary:
One more thing there. I was literally just before this webinar on a call with a company. I’ve heard it come up a lot too. I mean, there’s obviously a lot of really good reasons to know and understand your SubT tier supply chain. We’ve talked about a lot of them here, and I’d add to that list is sometimes your customer just comes to you and says, I need to know what your supply chain, your multi-tier supply chain looks like for the products, the programs that you’re supplying. To me, if you’re in the automotive industry, then you certainly are feeling that right now.
Jason Flake:
Yeah, it’s a good business to know it because you’ll be ahead of the competition.
Franziska Nothofer:
Brilliant, thank you both. Okay, next one. How should we connect risk into our systems to be able to reach a broader audience with these insights? Who would like to take this question?
Jason Flake:
I think that relates to the story I was just telling in terms of being able to tie all that information together and link it with your business data, not just the supply chain information that we have, but maybe I’ve missed something I talked about tying outside of Everstream, being able to tie that information to purchase orders, sales orders, that kind of stuff.
Jason Flake:
Maybe that’s when my mic was going out. Yeah, potentially.
Greg Leary:
Yeah. I was thinking it was almost like an IT kind of question. How do we bring data in and out or is that not the,
Jason Flake:
It’s got to be automated, it’s got to be pushed, it’s got to be configurable to make sure it’s going to the right system or the right people under the right conditions for every different kind of risk. So I think
Greg Leary:
Has to make people’s jobs easier, not harder. If you can pull all the relevant information into one place from your ERP, your transportation system, your material management system, then when you’re reacting to risk, it makes you more efficient. If you can’t avoid or predict it, then the next best thing you do is can respond to it as quickly as possible. So having those integrations is definitely helpful. We are very, as Jason mentioned, API friendly.
Jason Flake:
Yeah. And I’d say rather than pivoting away from the technical side of it is think of it from a business process side. I’ve got a planning process or I’ve got a forecasting process, or I’ve got a transportation planning process, or I’m trying to do demand and supply balancing. How can I get risk into those processes? Those processes are happening in certain systems and now we kind of advertise, yes, that’s why we integrate into various systems such as S-A-P-I-B-P and Oracle Transportation and can access, et cetera.
Franziska Nothofer:
Yep. Great. Thank you. We actually had another question come through that touches on IBP. What are the fundamental changes needed in an organization to get maximum benefits from the Everstream platform? Changes could be in the technology landscape, processes and data management. Two examples could be data sanitization, embedding risk assessment within IBP. Who would like to touch on that one?
Roy van Montfort:
I think we already provided some answers on that via the previous questions, but if we talk about changes in the technology landscape, you need to be lined up for that, right? So stream, we as an example, we have a certified SAP adaptor or integration as you call it, that knows what kind of information to send into IBP and then IBP understands I’m receiving that information from Apple team and weaves that into its planning process so that you can see which of my plans in IBP are going to be disrupted or potentially disrupted, et cetera. So that’s sort of the technology we have developed at least and in conjunction with an SAP. And with regards to the IBP process, it follows automatically, right? So IBP is a system where you have a very proper planning overview obviously, but essentially it doesn’t have risk information out of the box. So it’s a great way of adding that risk information via a solution like other streams of course. And then the automatic processes in SAP that are tied to that. So if something is blocked or can be planned, et cetera, that is obviously the added value in IBP, which acts on the information of, in this particular case, Everstream.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you Roy. And there’s another one just coming through. Tying into that, how easy is it to integrate risk data and how long does it take to get up and running in IBP?
Roy van Montfort:
Well, in IBP, I would say you need a validated certified as a P adapter, right? So obviously everything can be exchanged via API, right? So technically there are no limitations, but especially in organizations utilizing or using a large SAP deployments there as a P consultants or internal SAP experts, they always will require a certified adapter. So nine out of 10 times they will say, yes, we need a certified ADAPTO that is available on the SAP store as an example. That reduces first of all the implementation work and secondarily, they know it’s been properly validated, tested, et cetera. It’s approved by SAP, so to say, so, and that’s speed things up all three.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect.
Greg Leary:
But even if it’s not SAP, we can still get up and running fairly quickly with a really minimal amount of data. You don’t need a lot of data to provide a lot of value turn, and that can come pretty quickly. It’s really the locations you’re interested in monitoring your locations, your supplier locations. We load those up and you can start monitoring them for risk. You can start getting risk scoring, risk assessments on those pretty much just like that.
Franziska Nothofer:
Perfect. Thank you.
Vin Ramundo:
Limitations in the months, not years.
Roy van Montfort:
Absolutely.
Franziska Nothofer:
That’s great. Thank you. Okay. All right. We’re slowly coming to the end of today’s session and this has really been such a valuable conversation. Thank you to everyone who sent in and asked questions and of course, big thank you to our experts here on the line for sharing their insights. If you have any further questions regarding the topics discussed today or in general regarding supply chain with management solutions, please get in touch with our experts [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help. And we’ll also be sharing out this recording within the next 24 hours straight to your inbox so you can revisit any part of today’s discussion in your own time. Alright, this wraps up today’s session. Thanks again for joining us and have a lovely rest of your week and we’ll see you soon. Goodbye
Roy van Montfort:
Everybody. Thank you.