Forrester/Ivalua Study
A recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Ivalua, provides insights on the key challenges organizations are still facing in efforts to ensure supply continuity. The report, entitled, “Supply Continuity – A Visual Spotlight,” surveyed 462 global procurement leaders across the globe “about their organizations’ approaches to supplier management and how formalized their processes are.” From this, a maturity model was identified, which separated Leaders, Intermediates, and Beginners to better analyze initiatives. Interesting highlights include (directly quoted):
- 97% say ensuring supply continuity is a Crucial or Important priority
- 64% say ensuring supply continuity has increased in priority since COVID-19 (88% of Leaders)
- 77% of respondents rate their supply chain continuity in the past year as better than competitors
- 66% collaborate with suppliers to increase supply resilience. (91% of Leaders)
- Top Barriers To Ensuring Supply Continuity Include:
- Inability to effectively assess the overall risk across suppliers in a category (30%).
- Inadequate systems for defining and triggering our response to supply chain disruption (26%).
- Inability to effectively assess the risk of individual suppliers (25%).
Craft
Craft announced a new suite of products including Craft Risk Hub, Craft N-Tier Mapping, and Craft Alerts, “all of which provide critical, real-time risk assessment via objective data and innovative machine learning models.” More detail (directly quoted from press release):
- Craft Risk Hub helps supply chain and procurement professionals understand the overall health of an entire supplier network and determine where the highest risks exist. Users can surface contextualized insights on suppliers via data-driven benchmarking.
- With Craft Alerts, users stay up-to-date on crucial changes to suppliers through real-time monitoring and alerts across multiple risk categories, including cyber, financial, and ESG. Notifications are delivered via email, API, or the Craft Platform, and they’re extracted, categorized and validated from over 200k sources.
- Craft N-Tier Mapping removes the fear of single-source suppliers, and sheds light into areas where users may have a false perception of diversification. By highlighting Tier, 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers, supplier negotiations and due diligence become more effective and impactful.
In addition, research and analytics solutions provider, The Smart Cube, and Craft launched a new joint Category Monitor offering, to provide in-depth insights on categories most affected by global supply chain disruptions.
Resilinc
Supply chain resiliency solution provider, Resilinc, announced the Top 30 companies in the high-tech supply chain with the best risk and resiliency programs. “These 30 companies were selected based on their Resilinc R Score, a patented risk-scoring system that measures supply chain resiliency based on key metrics including performance, network resilience, transparency, continuity of supply, and risk program maturity.” Each company is a supplier to multiple high-tech OEMs and is part of Resilinc’s network. The top seven include:
- Nvidia Corp.
- Seagate Technology
- Keysight Technologies
- IBM Corp.
- Harman International
- Micron Technology
- Western Digital Corp.
Palantir and Concordance
Operating systems builder, Palantir Technologies, and independent healthcare distributor Concordance Healthcare Solutions LLC, announced a partnership to power the “first, fully integrated medical supply chain ecosystem – bringing together inventory and supply chain data from manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and providers into one cohesive, real-time system.” The press release states: “Palantir and Concordance have come together to build an ecosystem that can handle diverse data sets and disparate enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, regardless of compatibility, to create one agnostic point of reference. Powered by Palantir Foundry, the new ecosystem is accessible to any healthcare manufacturer, supplier, distributor, provider, or government public health agency with a license.”
Cirtuo and Beroe
Digital category management provider, Cirtuo and procurement intelligence and analytics provider, Beroe, are partnering to help enable companies with their category strategies. “Beroe will integrate its AI-powered digital assistant, Abi, with Cirtuo’s Guided Strategy Creation platform, enabling procurement to access external market intelligence, data, and insights while creating or updating category strategies for their business.” The press release cites a recent Gartner report: “Formal category management is on the rise and provides the most effective operating structure for procurement to deliver all its goals in volatile times: From supply and continuity to risk management, from collaboration to innovation, from ESG compliance to cost management.”
Image by Tung Nguyen from Pixabay