Blog Archives

Procurement challenges that could impact business profitability and continuity are solved by Trust Your Supplier

By Praveen Rao
Managing Director, Supply Chain Solutions and Partnerships
IBM Industry Platforms

Today’s businesses are operating in an increasingly complex world in which risk and volatility are putting new pressure on day-to-day business operations. A study by IBM indicates businesses are spending more than 50 percent of their revenues on procuring goods and services from their supplier base. Leading procurement organizations must excel in the fundamentals of reducing cost, ensuring compliance, driving performance and ensuring innovations in the supply base.

In today’s procurement world, a keystone in the sourcing strategy is to have vendor management methods that foster engaging with the right suppliers at minimal cost. This involves managing all aspects of supplier lifecycle from discovery and qualification to onboarding and monitoring.

Continuous monitoring of the supplier performance in today’s fast-paced and global environment, along with supplier rationalization as a key piece of strategy, must be considered by procurement organizations to innovate in driving better supplier management. In our conversations with large procurement organizations, these are some of the top procurement challenges for 2021 and beyond:

Reduce spend cost
Lack of resiliency in supply chains
Lack of risk mitigation around onboarding unfavorable suppliers
Outdated procurement systems
Lack of analytics for insights around supplier performance
Not enough focus on sustainability and diversity of supplier base
Dark purchasing that happens outside the approved procurement processes

So how do procurement organizations drive change to face these challenges? Trust Your Supplier (TYS) works with a network of enterprise buyer organizations to bring digital transformation to their industries. As an integral part of their strategy, the TYS blockchain platform is bringing transparency and supplier visibility at every touchpoint. The supplier owned profile, with information needed for onboarding and qualification, can be cross referenced against industry recognized validators to reduce your organization’s overall procurement cost and to support compliance activities such as diversity, sustainability, cyber security, and anti-corruption.

TYS boasts a rich marketplace of business partners that cater to evolving risks such as: supplier Identity, firmographics, financial, sustainability, cybersecurity, governmental sanctions, compliance and screening for undesirable entities.

Furthermore, TYS has partners into your supply chain resiliency and potential disruptions that could arise from unplanned events such as a pandemic or natural calamities. Marketplace providers offers continuous monitoring capabilities to ensure that your risk data is kept up to date with evolving market conditions. These solutions are offered through free basic data sets, bring your own license, and commercial license purchasing options.

To learn more about how Trust Your Supplier can help with your organization address these top procurement challenges and bring innovation to your supplier management process, please contact us to speak with an expert.

Praveen Rao
Email:[email protected]
Twitter:https://twitter.com/prao1

April Harrison July 26, 2021 Blog, Risk Management 0 Comments

Telecom Roundtable

April Harrison July 19, 2021 Blog, Telecom 0 Comments

CPO Arena

Our team had the opportunity to appear on CPO Arenea (Season 1, Episode 7). Similar to shows like Shark Tank, service providers pitch to a panel of experts that weigh in on their solution.

Congratulations to our team a successful performance in the CPO Arena! It was an impressive showcase of how Trust Your Supplier helps with onboarding suppliers faster, using operational intelligence and partnerships within our integrated, blockchain platform without unnecessary admin activities for buyers or suppliers.

Thanks to the CPO Arena team for having us on your show!

Watch the episode

April Harrison July 19, 2021 Blog 0 Comments

VentureBeat Article “How Chainyard built a blockchain to bring rivals together”

April Harrison June 21, 2021 Blockchain, Blog, News 0 Comments

The Trust Your Supplier (TYS) Network Welcomes GEODIS

GEODIS, a logistics company providing expertise in Supply Chain Optimization, Freight Forwarding, Contract Logistics, Distribution & Express and Road Transport, has joined the Trust Your Supplier network.

By joining TYS, GEODIS will have access to a single, aggregated view of complete supplier–provided details presented alongside authoritative third–party information. GEODIS’ suppliers will benefit by eliminating manual repetitive process, experiencing an acceleration of qualification & onboarding processes, and gain the potential for new business opportunities.

We would like to extend a warm welcome to GEODIS, along with their suppliers, to the TYS network!

April Harrison May 11, 2021 Blog 0 Comments

RapidRatings Expands Partnership with Trust Your Supplier by Joining as a Buyer

As a TYS business partner, RapidRatings provides actionable insights into the Financial Health stability (FHR) of public and private companies around the world.

RapidRatings, recognizing the value proposition of Trust Your Supplier, is inviting their suppliers to the TYS network!

RapidRatings‘ experience as a TYS business partner has given them an opportunity to view the TYS platform in action, solidifying the value they will garner for their own procurement team and suppliers. This recognition of merit is a significant testimony to Trust Your Supplier.

Trust Your Supplier values this additional partnership and welcomes RapidRatings, along with their suppliers, to the TYS network.

Learn more at https://trustyoursupplier.com/tys-buyers/rapidratings/

April Harrison April 19, 2021 Blog 0 Comments

The Value of a Blockchain-Based Identity

by April Harrison

A trusted supplier identity is the keystone of our Trust Your Supplier (TYS) platform. TYS provides organizations a trusted exchange of information across an encrypted blockchain environment to minimize risk & fraud throughout the onboarding and life cycle of partnerships. Our value proposition relies on ensuring identity control and privacy for network participants.

The exchange of information is crucial to business operations in all industries. Conventional systems are open to fraud, error and inefficiency. These manual processes lack data security and each participant has their own separate database, or ledger — increasing the possibility of human error or fraud. Shared databases cannot prevent malicious activity. Hacked entities can corrupt or destroy data in the shared database, making it invalid for everyone involved.

Blockchain is designed for trust and secure trading, reducing vulnerabilities. It provides clear provenance and a single, shared, tamper-evident ledger. Once recorded, transactions cannot be altered. This is ideal for supporting auditing capabilities as it provides an immutable relationship history between parties.

The TYS supplier profile data is sovereign, owned & controlled by the supplier, who can selectively share additional profile information with companies they choose to connect with on the network.

This single, digital identity for suppliers can be shared with multiple buyers and business networks. A 2-tiered supplier profile approach allows suppliers to be discovered by new customers without handing over unlimited access to their data.

To learn more about this innovative new approach to supplier identity that is transforming supplier relationships, please visit www.TrustYourSupplier.com

April Harrison April 15, 2021 Blockchain, Blog, Supplier Information Management April Harrison

Trust Your Supplier on Insureblocks Podcast

“Gary Storr, General Manager of Trust Your Supplier by ChainYard, explained to us some of the challenges that the supplier information management industry is facing with disparate sources of information and the role blockchain can help to mitigate them. In this podcast you will hear how Trust Your Supplier creates a trusted source of supplier information and digital identity that simplifies and accelerates supplier onboarding, lifecycle management and the seamless exchange of information.” – Insureblocks Podcast

April Harrison March 29, 2021 Blog 0 Comments

Assessing the Risk of a New Supplier Relationship

Supplier Relationship Management isn’t necessarily a new concept, but in today’s COVID-related, digital climate, its scope and structure should be formalized and followed diligently. Instead of a transactional interaction and a contract that gets shoved in a filing cabinet until renewal, GEP states that the nature of the vendor/supplier relationships is shifting to just that: relational. Long-term. A constant conversation that lasts throughout the contract – not just at the endpoints. Now, of course in any relationship there is risk.

Without diligence or with diligence only executed at the endpoints, it is much harder to figure out where the relationship went wrong if problems occur. CNN reported that the HHS’ Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response misappropriated the millions of dollars allocated to the Biomedical Advanced Research for administrative and office expenses, dubbing it the Bank of BARDA. If misappropriation and mistakes can happen in an organization with that degree of oversight, they can happen anywhere.

Gaps in normalcy like shipping delays, business shutdowns, limited manufacturing capabilities, and a higher-than-average online population gives a fraudster the perfect opportunity to slide in. So how can you identify whether your supplier is one you can count on?

GDC agrees with the PWC categorization risks in a supplier relationship. The risks are broken up into five segments:

Reputational Risk
A reputational risk means your business’ brand is affected. This can happen when the end-user experiences a product failure or substandard quality as a result of a bad supplier.

Resilience Risk
Resilience risks affect the customer’s access to the product because of a bad supplier. This can happen if a crucial part of your product is missing, and you must deem it out of stock.

Data Security and Privacy Risk
63% of data breaches happen from third party access, so strict security measures should be enforced in order to prevent stolen customer, employee, or partner data.

Regulatory Risk
Regulatory risks happen when a business violates the country- or jurisdiction-specific compliance requirements for outsourcing or signing with a supplier.

Commercial risk
Commercial risk can happen when supplier failure results in inaccurate or over billing, or when the costs of the supplier partnership is larger than the profit.

Now that you know your risks, it is time to think about how to solidify your process for supplier management and risk prevention.

Luckily, there are a few best practices and guidelines out there to lay the groundwork.

Vendor Selection
This is where we come in. Global Data Consortium is a data-as-a-service company that delivers real-time, locally sourced business verification for financial institutions around the globe to combat reputational, regulatory, and commercial risks. When you use GDC’s Know Your Business solution, you can choose from three types of checks with varying levels of verification and customizable match rules to meet whatever level of compliance your organization requires.

The key to a successful supplier relationship is to never let the bad ones get to you in the first place. Whether you’re seeking to verify the legitimacy of a potential supplier, conduct a risk analysis, or confirm the beneficial owners and directors, GDC’s KYB solution helps you kick your supplier relationship management process off with a head start.

Contract
Setting a contract up with your supplier means setting expectations up with your supplier. Make sure both parties are aware of the duration of the partnership, quantity of work, and quality of service expected.

Vendor Management
As stated above, the nature of a supplier relationship is shifting. Monitor your partnership throughout the life of it and keep an open line of communication.

Contingency Planning
Even with all the precautions listed above, things can still go wrong. If a supplier falls through, have a backup plan so you can still avoid a resilience risk.

And there you have it! Although every organization has its own structure, these best practices should set the groundwork for what will be an exceptional supplier relationship management process.

Want to start your supplier relationship management process off on the right foot? Check out our page to learn more about how GDC’s Know Your Business solution can help you minimize Regulatory, Reputational, and Commercial risks for a supplier relationship you can be confident in.

April Harrison March 17, 2021 Blog, Risk Management, Supplier Information Management 0 Comments GDC, Supplier Discovery, Supplier Information management, Supplier Risk Management

RapidRatings for Supply Chain Risk Managers: This Moment is Yours (and The Next One Too)

by RapidRatings

In painting, there is an oft-used technique where colors, lines, and shapes are applied with increasing or decreasing intensity to create atmospheric distance. This technique obscures images by imitating the conditions produced in the atmosphere: fog, clouds, mist, and even gloom.

In Supply Chain (writ large), there is also a type of atmospheric perspective.

More so than just the snapshots of cargo moving through air, land, or sea—risk management views can be obscured by great time-distances or (potentially) illusory information that underpins a given outlook.

But in your role, you can’t have that. You need an unobstructed view; one dependent on clear, reliable information to manage risk in its many forms. Real data matters.

Even pre-pandemic, the world was getting riskier. And the decisions that supply chain risk managers made on any given day, were made more complex by changing weather patterns, natural disasters, new cybersecurity threats, and dynamic changes in international trade.

With the pandemic, that complexity has multiplied; and your role made even tougher. And “Supply chain” is now at the tip of everyone’s tongues (even consumers).

Your perspective (the supply-chain-risk-management one), has never been more important.

But to meet this moment (and inevitably the next), you’ll need accurate data, unblurred by false flags like share price or payment statements; not to mention, a standard scale to compare the financial health of your suppliers across your portfolio; and finally, a discreet, secure network of supplier information that allows suppliers to proactively, and objectively, communicate with you and your team.

Because—for most enterprises—supply chain resiliency starts and stops with you. And you should have the data and analytics tools that support all of those (ever-more-public) responsibilities, regardless of industry or geography, and beyond the day-to-day of on time/on spec fulfillment.

This is your moment. How will you make your mark?

Save time and resources by outsourcing your private company supplier financials to a company that has a track record of discretion and success—in over 150 countries.

Conduct accurate, comparable (and sharable) assessments with accurate scoring based on 73 efficiency and resilience ratios, 24 industry models, and decades of data from companies that have not only defaulted or filed for bankruptcy—but those that have survived and thrived.

Have meaningful conversations (internally and externally) with automated reporting that includes talking points in a relationship-centric dialogue, so you can ask the right questions—with or without financial expertise.

Connect the dots of supplier information management with an advanced data and analytics platform, Trust Your Supplier, that integrates validated risk information into supplier profiles for advanced insights, accelerated onboarding, and trusted exchange of information.

And dissipate the fog; get an early warning on public and private suppliers, alike, through predictive technology that’s purpose-built to have more meaningful business relationships—by mitigating and solving challenges before they turn into disruptions and dramatically impact or break the bottom line.

To learn more about how RapidRatings with Trust Your Supplier can help support supply chain risk management in the pandemic era, please click here.

April Harrison March 11, 2021 Blog, Risk Management, Supplier Information Management 0 Comments