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Moving to Proactive Intelligence: The Future of Supply Chain Management

September 10, 2024

Article

Introduction

Data is one of the core challenges facing supply chain management. Organizations face a tsunami of data generated daily across the supply chain from multiple systems, digital technologies, IoT devices, and advanced tracking systems.

This wealth of data is critical for achieving supply chain resilience, helping organizations navigate larger and more complex supply chains along with challenges that range from procurement risks and global regulations to sustainability demands.

The challenge, however, is finding the right data to help fortify and optimize supply chains. Without the right strategy and capabilities, organizations cannot proactively make informed decisions to build resilience and navigate disruptions.

In this article, learn why organizations need to evolve their supply chain management toward a more proactive approach to achieve true resilience. By leveraging Exiger’s Proactive Intelligence, organizations can gain a competitive edge and navigate the complexities of their supply chains.

The Data Ocean Dilemma

Data is vital in tackling today’s most significant supply chain risks, allowing organizations to gain deeper visibility and map out their supply chain to protect themselves against disruptions and regulatory noncompliance.

However, organizations today are currently submerged in a vast ocean of data that encompasses everything from inventory levels and transportation routes to production schedules and employee availability. While this data holds valuable insights to help organizations optimize their operations and reduce costs, the challenge lies in determining the right data to make informed choices.

“We essentially help our customers get entity level intelligence, supply chain level intelligence, and product- and component-level intelligence to actually create a proactive posture inside of their supply chains.”

Brandon Daniels

CEO, Exiger

Today, roughly 95% of manufacturing data exists outside of the organization’s immediate ecosystem. While manufacturers may have critical internal information on their employees and operations, external data — which includes information about their suppliers, import-export records, and corporate registries — often lack the recency, quality, and comprehensiveness needed for actionable insights.

Organizations must gain value chain data beyond their own organization to build resilience.

The Competitive Edge of Value Chain Data

Value chain data, which encompasses supply chain information across various markets, can be a significant competitive advantage.

This type of data allows you to monitor demand in other industries, where the dependencies are, stay ahead of industry competitors, and mitigate potential disruptions. You can, for instance, look at suppliers in industries that are adjacent or have dependencies in your supplier network and take the steps to create direct supply chain orchestration and collaboration opportunities with those suppliers.

This way, when another industry has a huge boom and pulls on the same materials you need to service your customers, your organization can use that intel to pursue alternate suppliers and stay ahead of competitors. This lets you become resilient in seismic issues that may not exactly be your industry but impact your ability to service your customers.

Industry Example

An automotive manufacturer with razor-thin margins needs to have infotainment systems that go inside their cars. The infotainment system requires chips, and the chipmakers are purchasing semiconductors.

With value chain visibility, the automotive manufacturer can see the chip and semiconductor suppliers that are three, four, or five tiers out and have visibility of how much a chip costs to make. Gaining this multi-tier visibility also brings an understanding of competitors that work with another industry. For instance, the chip supplier may also supply the cloud computing and satellite industries, which widens the manufacturer’s competitive landscape.

The automotive manufacturer can then make decisions that best suit their circumstances, such as going to a sub-tier supplier directly or opting for a direct or embedded spending program. Organizations can also purchase stocks in bulk and farm those out to upstream suppliers and capture the cost differential.

This way, the automotive manufacturer can avoid chip shortages and disruptions when other industries experience a boom.

In short, analyzing this kind of value chain data can give you actionable intelligence that tells you what things are likely to happen, what things could impact you, and — most importantly — help you make mitigation decisions.

Proactive Intelligence: Transforming Supply Chain Decision-Making

Exiger’s Proactive Intelligence bridges the gap between third-party and supply chain data while providing the analysis and insights critical to mitigating disruption risks and staying ahead of the competition.

This capability is part of the 1Exiger platform that uses AI to uncover risks in all tiers of the supply chain. The platform analyzes millions of supply chain and open-source records and screens findings against watchlists and proprietary datasets, which include the largest forced labor database in the world and the leading parts and logistics intelligence platform. The results generate risk-scored assessments and predictive insights and enable quick, informed decisions.

With Proactive Intelligence, organizations can:

Gain deep visibility and data on the suppliers, companies, and other entities they work with, including the operations, facilities, ownership, and the entire comprehensive business profile. This lets you prioritize the firmographic information about these companies to understand the risks and opportunities of working with these suppliers.
Take the supplier ecosystem and expand it out to a supply chain, revealing where the dependencies are in the supply chain and who the critical suppliers are, and identify risks that include forced labor risks, carbon emission risks, and more.
Use the multi-tier visibility to orchestrate the supply chain, so organizations know their suppliers and sub-tier suppliers and can engage them as needed.
Achieve entity-level as well as product- and component-level intelligence to create a proactive posture for their supply chain management.

By embracing proactive supply chain management, companies can survive and thrive, even in the face of unforeseen challenges.