[email protected]
www.standpointsoftware.com
Supply Chain Use Case
Key Business Value Tag Concepts:
• Social Automation for Precise Customer Advertising and Effective enterprise brand curation
• Measurable increase brand, business, and agency opportunity and risk management.
• Identify and leverage hidden or key influencers that drive enterprise metrics
• Leverage networked automation to adapting and managing complexities of digital relation
ship to data
• Reduce cost of Big Data aggregation and analytics using smart intelligent automation
Overview:
Supply chain resilience is an increasingly important factor of company performance as global
supply chains expand beyond the visibility and control of traditional supply chain, asset, and
risk management systems available to most management teams today.
Effective supply chain risk assessment today must consider geopolitical and economic
dynamicsthat did not exist ten years ago. These dynamically changing factors increasingly
amplify supply chain challenges and disruptions caused by natural disasters, labor disputes,
obsolescence, local and regional disputes over raw materials and labor practices.
Typical supply chain risk management methods focus on suppliers that the supply chain
owneroperator has direct contact and relationships with. Suppliers deeper in the
owner-operator’s supply chain can pose serious risks to a company’s products and its
brand reputation.
Traditionally mandated continuity of operations plans outline how a company hopes to respond
after a disruption occurs. Today’s hyper competitive environment requires companies to focus
on preventing disruptions from happening in the first place.
Accomplishing this requires continuous and independently verifiable risk assessment of very
node on every tier of every dynamically changing local supply chain comprising a company’s
global supply chain. In the past neither the communications infrastructure nor the information
technology required to make this feasible existed. Today it does.
The ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service approach provides companies with resources that enable
them to appreciate the breadth and depth of their supply chain. It gives executives and
managers a visual picture of all supplier relationships in their supply chain – including small
suppliers often hidden behind a larger one. Its allows companies to see how their supply chains
dynamically change over time, and how those changes effect production.
ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service uses supplier data to support simulations enabling executives
to anticipate future events across the entire network, not just those nodes the company deals
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What is ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service?
ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service is a platform application service. It provides executives, program
managers, and other supply chain stakeholders with actionable data uniquely tailored to their
specific supply chain network.
Each ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service supply network configuration represents not only the
‘as-is’ (or in the design phase ‘to-be’) network, but can be used to simulate alternate network
configurations as well as model explicit or even random disruption events at any point in the
network. The unique combination of this modeling and data access control policy provides a
high degree of protection while serving the needs of original equipment manufacturer (OEM)
with insight sufficient to improve supply chain strategy.
ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service specifically addresses the shortfall of most supply chain models
with unique capabilities of StandPoint’s ETHoS™ by:
• Protecting supplier intellectual property and trade secrets through an active policy-based
platform that enables disclosure of critical supplier information only for the purposes of
conducting risk assessment and modeling.
• Guards and hides critical supplier data with a suite of data policies that continuously checks
and audits data use, distribution, and storage. These policies can be established by the
supplier and independently audited and verified by a third party.
• Provides continuously and independently verified supply chain data to ETHoS™ Supply Chain
Service models for high definition identification, visualization, and analysis of critical paths
and key dependencies.
• Supports continuous independent modeling and effectiveness assessment of prevailing and
alternative supply chain operations policies affecting channel configurations, supplier
augmentation/replacement options, etc.
• Supports explicit and random disruption simulation, net-effect and alternative
configuration modeling.
• Calculates a resilience score unique to each network providing supply chain managers,
program managers, and executives with decision-quality data that can be taken for action.
With the application of ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service to the supply chain gains deeper
dimensions when you add intelligent agents of the ETHoS™ platform, called Advocates, to it.
Intelligent, social, automated Advocates could , for example, detect available capacities in a
fleet of trucks, collate loads already in transport or available for pickup, and map capacities
and loads to delivery destinations. They could notify drivers and supply chain managers of
recommended adjustments in capacity utilization with possible consolidations and streamlined
vehicle routing. Those capabilities could help a company optimize its use of resources and
provide faster delivery at a lower cost.
© 2014, Standpoint Software LLC. All rights reserved.
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Similarly, intelligent social ETHoS™ Advocates could play a productive role in correlating
warehouse locations and spaces with customer locations for more efficient sourcing and
shipping of merchandise. Or, they could apply a company’s set criteria to the selection of
logistics and shipping service providers, which could enable the business to realize savings and
obtain better performance from its trading partners.
ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service can be configured as either a proprietary platform where OEMs
can configure, operate, and maintain the environment within their own enterprise, or function
as a cloud-based service where the growing repository of participant suppliers can significantly
improve overall model fidelity.
OEM Benefits
OEMs face daunting challenges when configuring their supply chain. These challenges start in
the product design phase and are often acutely experienced in production and delivery where a
component decision reached during design can create irreversible constraints
during production. In the Porter’s Five Forces framework, suppliers can exert significant
influence and control over an OEM’s when a single component becomes critical and supplier
alternatives are scarce.
ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service can support OEMs in the design phase by modeling prospective
suppliers based on a preliminary bill of materials (BOM) and determining which component(s)
expose the company’s plans to unacceptable levels of risk. Selection of supplier components
deemed to compose unacceptable risk can be flagged for deletion or the design can be
modified to reduce or mitigate the risk. During production, ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service can
provide regular updates on supplier performance allowing them to identify emerging issues
before they become disruptions. Simulating disruptions allows development of contingency
plans that can speed response should an event occur.
While ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service can be employed inside an OEM’s enterprise, the benefit of
the ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service service is access to a broader range of participant suppliers
as well as factoring a supplier’s capacity as a function of their support in other networks. For
example, a satellite semiconductor supplier likely provides parts to more than one OEM. The
ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service enables an OEM to take into consideration how a supplier
disruption may be amplified and complicated by recovery processes that affect multiple OEMs.
ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service can also provide leverage to OEMs through a compliance
strategy. Suppliers unwilling to participate in ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service can be penalized or
even removed from consideration in the OEM’s plans. This puts a degree of power back into the
hands of the OEM where mandating participation can be used as a supplier selection criterion.
This allows the OEM to assess the viability of a supplier before design decisions finalized and
contracts are awarded.
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Supplier Benefits
On the surface, ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service may appear to prospective suppliers as a
coercive attempt by OEMs to reach into their businesses. However, participation in ETHoS™
Supply Chain Service has particular benefits for suppliers that can be leveraged to improve
their revenue growth and help them sustain the business they already have.
The resilience score calculated for a supplier is not a one-time assessment. The score
is continuously reassessed as a supplier performs and improves. Capacity, process
improvements, and myriad of other factors that determine a supplier’s ability to meet or exceed
it customer’s needs are all used to calculate its score.
Further, suppliers can themselves use ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service to manage their
downstream supply chain and in fact, the ETHoS™ Supply Chain Service analysis increases in
reliability and utility as the network is expanded. Unless a supplier is the originating source
(such as raw materials), supply chains are embedded networks within networks and can be
easily affected by other suppliers. Therefore, a subsystem or component supplier has as much
need to understand their own supply chain as the OEMs they are supporting.
Supplier Benefits
The following scenarios that are doable and should be interesting to the customer:
• Discovery of a common sub-supplier, i.e. a two suppliers, perhaps unknowingly, share a
subsupplier. This common supplier is a risk point to both suppliers. Each supplier may
consider their supply change to be proprietary but may share information for this
determination. The identity of the sub-supplier may or may not be disclosed but there can be
an effect on the resilience of the consumers of the sub-supplier.
• Resilience rollup. Suppliers grant access to their sub-suppliers and transport methods/sites
for gathering input to calculate resilience of the sub-suppliers and rolled up to the supplier.
• Transport routes. Suppliers grant access to where their sub-suppliers are and transport
method for material. This is to access transport risk based on location and method.
• Disclosure of resilience. Suppliers allow their resilience score to be seen by the OEM (or
potential OEM).
• Disclosure of anomalies. If deliveries or production are disrupted beyond a certain extent the
OEM can see what the cause is.
• Source material audit. An OEM may require a certain supplier or even material from a certain
location be used. The suppliers and sub-suppliers agree to expose their information
about where they obtained material. An agreed policy exposes the data for this purpose. An
auditing ETHoS™ Advocate implements this purpose.
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Another possible scenario is the choice of materials/components for a product based on the
resilience of the producers. An equivalent choice might be made that reduces risk. Another
is an Advocate (ETHoS™ social software agent) could negotiate with suppliers for disclosure
of the information needed (the data policies they agree to) and decides whether to use the
supplier. For instance it may have a resilience score from another ecosystem and doesn’t
want to disclose the information needed (the data policies they agree to) and decides whether
to use the supplier. For instance it may have a resilience score from another ecosystem and
doesn’t want to disclose as much information – the Advocate can weigh the trust in the other
ecosystem’s score.
To learn more about Standpoint ETHoS™ please contact:
[email protected]
© 2014, Standpoint Software LLC. All rights reserved.