TCS Manufacturing Intelligent Enterprise - Supplier Risk Insights Management

TCS technology platform Manufacturing Intelligent Enterprise envisages supply chain solutions focused on visibility, resilience, efficiency, and sustainability. The Supplier Risk Insights Management solution helps manufacturing customers to achieve resiliency by reducing supplier risk through mitigation. Furthermore, the solution also enables manufacturers to prepare themselves to quickly adjust and recover from any unanticipated supply chain disruptions. This solution leverages core Azure infrastructure services such as VM, Storage, VNET, Microsoft SQL Database, Active Directory, and ALB, services such as Monitor, Backup, Site Recovery along with Azure Kubernetes, Application Gate Way – WAF and Azure Blob Container.

The overall solution approach entails predicting and mitigating supplier’s risk and assessing each supplier’s risk across three dimensions.

1. Operational Risk: Timely delivery and perfect order rates are the hallmarks of an excellent supplier base. Suppliers with frequent deviations from these standards are deemed operationally risky. Predictive models analyze historical shipment data to assess potential risks in future shipments. These shipment level risks guide the planners to proactively mitigate the impacts of imperfect deliveries and delays.
2. Geo-political Risk: Supply chains are mostly global in nature with suppliers situated across distant countries. Natural disasters and impending political instability in supplier locations can disrupt future shipments. By strategically assessing geo-political risks in advance, supply chain planners stave off the potential supply related threats.
3. Financial Risk: Supplier’s sound financial situation is essential for ensuring smooth on-time deliveries with accurate quantities as per shipment schedules. Supplier’s critical financial performance measures such as profitability, liquidity, turnover and efficiency has a bearing on its day-to-day operations, which potentially impacts the future shipments. Understanding supplier’s financial risk profile is a key aspect for maintaining long-term resilience in supply chain operations.

Risk mitigation part gathers user inputs from supply chain planners on aspects such as alternative suppliers, location, cost etc., and uses optimizer to allocate shipments to alternate suppliers. The results of optimization provide the user the insights on Cost Vs Resilience trade-off in the situation involving alternate suppliers.

Thus, the solution aids supply chain planners with a complete risk profile of the supplier base considering operational, financial, and geographical risk factors which is critical to identify high-risk suppliers. The underlying algorithms assess risk impact and recommend risk mitigation strategies to collaborate with partners for risk resolution.