Are you ready to benefit from a transparent, visible, and connected supply chain?

Inflation, wars, and environmental shocks will continue to hinder supply chains. Learn how Supply Chain Intelligence can help to respond to change, get deep visibility beyond direct suppliers, and minimize disruption risk.

Weather forecasters are pretty good at predicting severe storms based on historical data, local atmospheric conditions, and using numerical prediction models, massive computer programs that use physics and math to describe how the atmosphere will behave. You don’t have to be an economist to predict what's on the horizon given current conditions - the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war, the coming food catastrophe, global chip shortage, and rising transportation costs are all creating the perfect storm! 

The complexity and spread of supply chains across the world make them vulnerable to disruptions. Research by the McKinsey Global Institute found that, on average, companies experience a disruption of one to two months in duration every 3.7 years. In the consumer goods sector, the financial fallout of these disruptions over a decade is likely to equal 30 percent of one year’s EBITDA. How can supply chain leaders prevent this disruption? What can they do to make their supply chains more robust, resilient, and responsive? 

In this article on future-proofing your supply chain, McKinsey experts discuss ways to address supply chain vulnerabilities. The authors state that most organizations lack effective systems to measure and monitor vulnerabilities, and few have such visibility beyond their direct suppliers. In a 2021 survey of senior supply chain executives, just under half said they understood the location of their tier-one suppliers and the key risks those suppliers face. But only 2 percent could make the same claim about suppliers in the third tier and beyond. That matters because most disruptions originate in these deeper supply chain tiers.

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According to a Gartner report published before the covid pandemic, visibility and traceability across end-to-end supply chains were the most important funded supply chain initiative. Post-pandemic visibility and traceability have become even more critical. Today, global enterprise strategy leaders, chief supply chain officers (CSCOs), and CIOs have a unique opportunity to future-proof their supply chains, mitigate risk, and have more granular visibility across their multi-tier supply chains. 

As a supply chain leader, you need to understand anomalies, outages, and disruptions at your suppliers and your supplier’s suppliers, and your competitors. And this needs to happen in near real-time to allow efficient and cost-effective business decisions. Timely operational planning is crucial to maintain operations and to be better informed about pricing and supply. 

Did you know that supply chain intelligence using multisource geospatial data can help you to increase supply chain visibility, enhance traceability, and improve operational efficiency? By combining satellite imagery, telemetry (IoT) data, and computer vision and geolocation algorithms, an AI-powered geospatial platform can illuminate your supply chains, monitor daily activity levels, perform anomaly detection and reduce disruption risk.

An advanced geospatial analytics platform can enable you to analyze production activity, track shipments, monitor supply chains, and answer critical questions around risk: 

• Map out end-to-end supply chain to see all suppliers, monitor risks/disruptions 
• Make critical operational decisions in time based on pricing and supply data 
• Identify key suppliers and visualize interdependencies to mitigate risk 
• Locate ports that are having delays and where to reroute goods to improve utilization 
• Identify ships that are taking longer to arrive, make alternate plans 
• Analyze connected vehicle data - count trucks and cars at manufacturing plants and distribution centers, perform anomaly detection

Supply chain leaders can implement location intelligence solutions to streamline operations. The next generation of supply chain intelligence solutions leverage AI, location data, and automation to take the complexity out of supply chain management. These solutions empower supply chain managers to analyze delivery patterns, spot warning signs from suppliers struggling to keep up with demand and check their financial health to identify alternatives quickly. The best supply chain intelligence solutions facilitate collaboration between procurement, sales & operations, and demand planning teams. Finally, these solutions capture competitive insights, improve sourcing and build long-term strategic differentiation. 

However, only a few organizations are aggregating data from multiple sources, combining location analytics and machine learning techniques to analyze and monitor their end-to-end supply chains. For example, Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, uses satellite imagery, location data, and AI to track and monitor its raw material sourcing for Palm oil. 

It’s time for consumer packaged goods, chemical, and automotive companies to leverage location intelligence for enhanced supply chain visibility and traceability. Novel location-based supply chain intelligence solutions can detect changes in the supplier ecosystem, uncover hidden patterns indiscernible to the naked eye, and deliver competitive insights at scale. Since most disruptions originate in the deeper supply chain tier, you must update legacy technology, have the systems to measure and monitor supply chain vulnerabilities and get visibility into indirect suppliers today.

Curious to learn more about AI-powered geospatial analytics and how it can help you promote sustainability, and improve supply chain visibility and resiliency, check us out:

Go deeper

• Download the eBook, 7 Keys to Your Supply Chain Success, and see how our customers, such as Unilever, Celanese, BP, and others, are using geospatial analytics to gain Supply Chain Intelligence
• Explore Supply Chain Intelligence
• Unilever's approach to tackling deforestation: In Southeast Asia’s Oil Palm Fields, Unilever teams with Orbital Insight to Fight Deforestation