New DHL solution to provide businesses with foresight on supply chains risks
DHL has launched a new tool that it says enables companies to gain further understanding of risks impacting their supply chain.
The solution will be delivered through DHL Resilience360, the group's innovative, cloud-based risk management platform and early warning system.
The platform combines years of systemically collected supply chain data with some of the most comprehensive risk databases available on the market, including a weighted index across more than 30 risk categories, with customer supply chain and business impact data to provide predictions of potential future obstacles.
The analysed and consolidated data is visualised in a succinct manner and helps businesses have an increasingly clear view into their supply chains, said DHL.
“As global businesses are growing rapidly while supply chains are becoming more complex, it is crucial for our customers to detect future obstacles along the supply chain and take early actions to mitigate business risks," commented Tobias Larsson, Head of Resilience360, DHL Customer Solutions & Innovation.
During Hurricane Harvey, about 33% of US chemical production was disrupted and many chemical suppliers had to give force majeure notices.
DHL said Resilience360 Analytics showed that the expected shortages of basic industrial building blocks such as ethylene, chlorine or butadiene are likely to have an impact on the Automotive, Life Science & Healthcare and Electronics industries.
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A manufacturing company in one of these sectors, for example, might have a supplier of chemicals that ships items by rail from the Port of Houston.
Armed with the knowledge that the port and the railway were likely to be closed for a certain period of time, the customer could be the first to pre-order additional supplies to cover that period.
The new module immediately provides insights to companies, helping them to gain profound understanding of risks affecting their supply chain. These insights include:
- Benchmarking dashboards to compare own risk profiles with those of industry peers and to receive early-warnings on incidents.
- Sector-specific analysis based on unique risk profiles of various geographically mapped supplier production locations.
- Risk bottlenecks in supply chains by analysing registered incidents that have had impact on nodes and receiving user feedback on relevant events.
- Supply chain pain points by combining historic as well as forward-looking risk information with supplier data (trade volumes, business impact scores, value at risk, single sourcing etc.).
The new module for instance shows that automotive and aerospace industries are 16.6% and 4% below the average risk profile, meaning that these industries are the most risk averse, while chemicals and technology have a substantially higher risk profile with figures at 8% and 10% above the average respectively.
"Utilising the new analytical tool and methods now gives us the basis to develop regression and predictive models, further enhancing our solutions in the area of risk mitigation. Together with the Deutsche Post DHL Data Science teams, we are currently looking into alternative re-routing suggestions as well as shipment delay predictions, to forecast the likelihood and the potential duration of shipment disruptions for risk events along transportation hubs using millions of historic DHL shipment data sets," said Rick Tillenburg, Senior Customer Operations Analyst at Resilience360.
From natural disasters to cyber-attacks and a quickly changing regulatory environment, organisations need to be prepared in order to take quick action when the inevitable occurs. The new R360 Analytics application complements DHL's Resilience360 platform in order to map out specific industries and the subsequent impacts to other industries likely to run short of supply in the event of a disruption.
