In the general or traditional view of supply chain especially in a global supply chain,  is the normal way of operations where you’re applying as much automation or insight or trying to get insight into since you’re looking for some version of predictability.

So as you can imagine, when COVID hit a lot of businesses went to almost zero production, which disrupted a large amount of the supply chain of the world. Some of those raw materials were either missing or the value added by middle companies wasn’t there, so the raw material didn’t make it into the specific place you needed it to build your product.

One example of this was chip manufacturing, which has slowed down, then demand came back and it was like a massive roar and because we’re in a world where everything is computerized and digital, just about everything needs those chips and car makers are some of the biggest users, your AC has several chips, your entertainment control system has several chips, so everything has a bunch of chips, even the way you move your seat up and down if it’s electric has chips.

So that’s how disruptive supply chain issues can be and having an eye on all of your vendors and the promises that you have is very crucial to all of this, there is the need to be reading all of the documents that you receive from your vendors and that you send out to your clients.  

Systems to do that are things like Zenith and Apogee, where you can extract all of this intelligence from all of that procurement and invoice and agreement documents that you have and build a full picture of the whole thing and give you much better visibility into any vulnerability you may have in the supply chain is typical or not.

If you digitize them and put them into a database, you can then run more involved machine-learning models to understand where you’re exposed.