A few weeks ago I ran a Graph Summit within IBM where we brought together a broad cross-section of innovators from across the company. It was an inspiring event that gave us all a glimpse into the wide range of innovation that is happening around graph technology, and showed us many interesting new use cases for graph analytics. In this post I want to share one of the many solutions that were presented, and hope to share many more over the coming months.
Do you really understand your supply chain? Perhaps not as well as you think.
A supply chain is like an iceberg, the majority of it sits under the water and out of your immediate line of sight. Your suppliers are rarely ever self-sufficient, but instead will rely on a network of their own suppliers who in turn may rely on others. This creates a complex set of dependencies all of which have the potential to impact your supply chain in many unpredictable ways.
CorpGraph, built by the smart folks from IBM jStart, is a solution that in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet allows you to uncover your hidden supply chain network; providing visualization and analytics to help you assess your risk, identify any weak points, find potential non-compliances, uncover any conflicts of interest, and feel confident in the stability and reliability of your supply chain.
You are only as strong as your weakest link, and with complex opaque supply chain networks you can have many weak points that you are not even aware of. Is your overall supplier network robust or brittle? Have you a higher than expected dependency on certain suppliers? Are those suppliers exposed to an unacceptable level of risk? Perhaps financial, geo-political, or due to their own brittle supply chains? Have you redundancy in your network? Or are you exposed to multiple points of failure?
CorpGraph leverages Dun & Bradstreet‘s Company Financial Health Scores, Corporate Ownership Structures, and Sub-tier Supplier data, in order to build out a supplier network and combines with your own supply chain data in order to provide you with personalized supply chain assessment. CorpGraph’s approach to supply chain analysis not only helps you better understand your risk, but also can help you mitigate that risk through adding supplier diversity and optimizing your overall supplier network to minimize points of failure.
Your reputation is your most valuable aspects, and you cannot afford an opaque supply chain to impact it; with CorpGraph you can sleep easy at night knowing that there are no surprises lurking in the shadows.
If you are interested in learning more about this solution, which runs on the IBM Cloud, please reach out to the folks from IBM jStart.
And big call-out to Graham MacKintosh for sharing his project with me.
Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations 
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