Proactive intelligence enables you to balance the fine line between cost and resilience, says Brandon Daniels, chief executive officer of Exiger.

Think about this: 95% of what a company utilizes to build a product sits outside its ecosystem. So even though a manufacturer is awash with data, it’s residing with internal operations and employees. “It doesn't inform me on my suppliers,” says Daniels. “I've got a lot of data, but it might not be the right data to help me to improve my supply chain.”

Of course, there’s a huge amount of information on suppliers. But analytics is required to understand the recency, quality and comprehensiveness of that data. “So being able to boil the ocean and bring it down to something meaningful, it's hard,” Daniels says.

Vetting suppliers is truly a science. If you can, for instance, understand the demand other industries have for the products you need to manufacture your goods, then you can monitor those industries for significant spikes in demand that can adversely affect your operations.

As an example, Daniels says an auto manufacturer needs to know if an infotainment system supplier is able to secure the needed semiconductor chips when, say, a satellite communications manufacturer might grab a larger share of these indispensable items

“Be ahead of the rest of the people in your industry when, for instance, another industry has a huge boom and pulls on the same materials that you need to service your customer,” he says. “You've already got your demands and your requirements and your inventory at the top of the queue. It allows you to become resilient in the face of what could be seismic issues that aren't exactly in your industry, but which impact your ability to service your customer.”

This video is sponsored by Exiger

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