This company is a technology and innovation leader focused on creating solutions that help make the world a safer place. They specialize in defense, civil government and cybersecurity in many sectors around the world.
The Challenge
Managing their supply chain was becoming a significant challenge at this large defense contractor. The Director of Supply Chain Technology Operations was challenged in two ways.
- They were struggling to understand the global risk in their supply chain to prevent supplier disruption. In recent years they had expanded their supplier base globally and they needed a timely way to effectively monitor changes. Current processes provided a monthly flat file via FTP which was loaded into their internal Procurement system. The data lag opened the potential for supplier failure that they knew could cripple their supply chain in an instant.
- A second focus at this contractor was on their supplier database that had quickly grown to more than 90K suppliers. They had a suspicion that there were duplicates in this number. There was also limited sharing of supplier knowledge across their business units, making it critical for them to have a clean supplier database to rely on.
They knew they needed more insight on the risk of a supplier to effectively manage this or they would face potential disruption of key materials needed in the production and manufacturing process or worse, government sanctions for dealing with debarred or risky suppliers.
The Solution
After consulting their Dun & Bradstreet sales executive team, they knew they needed a solution that would deliver data electronically and formatted to feed into their existing internal systems. As a result, this industry leader implemented two solutions that integrated with their existing internal systems. This company is a technology and innovation leader focused on creating solutions that help make the world a safer place. They specialize in defense, civil government and cybersecurity in many sectors around the world.
- Dun & Bradstreet’s Supplier Risk Manager with an Alerts module and Custom Report
- Dun & Bradstreet’s D&B Direct provided API integration
into Supplier Intelligence (SI)
How it Works
Dun & Bradstreet’s Supplier Risk Manager with an Alerts module and Custom Report capabilities was put in place to better manage supplier risk, as follows:
- On a daily basis - a process is in place to monitor suppliers loaded into Supplier Risk Manager on a daily basis for debarment and watch list.
- On a weekly basis a file is pulled out of Supplier Risk Manager and processed through D-U-N-S validation and then appended with risk data on all suppliers and sent via FTP.
Dun & Bradstreet’s D&B Direct provided API integration into Supplier Intelligence (SI) that was implemented to perform criteria searches to locate and populate potential suppliers. Quarterly API calls are conducted to refresh the business intelligence with access to Company Profile, Linkage, Financials and News.
The Results & ROI
This large contractor was able to reduce their active supplier base from 90K to 38K contacts. This eliminated 52K duplicates or records that did not belong in the supplier base. Now, with Dun & Bradstreet providing the data, the contractor experienced time and resource savings as there was no need to pull, verify and locate data from multiple sources. They also liked the way they had access to vetted, local country suppliers which they saw as a big advantage.
The bottom line is there belief that the ongoing integrity of their supplier information is now ensuring that their decisions are based on current and correct supplier intelligence.
Related to Supply Chain disruption, using a custom solution, they were able to update their Enterprise Procurement System with risk data on a weekly basis instead of monthly – thus, reducing data decay on their risk insight from 30+ days to 7.