As a proud conference sponsor, Craft recently had the opportunity to participate in the FORGE: Dollars & Sense event, organized by Procurement Foundry on August 5. 

Over 500+ delegates from Procurement Foundry’s global community of 5,000+ sourcing and supply chain professionals (as well as non-members) attended the live virtual event. 

Featuring discussions with top procurement leaders spanning multiple industries, including Ebiquity, Kantar, Deloitte, Scotiabank, and more, the virtual conference was “designed to help [attendees] uncover and put into play, cutting-edge tools and technologies advancing procurement.” 

Our team had the pleasure of leading two sessions at the event: 

We’ve summarized the highlights for you below: 

Breakout Session: Deploying Intelligent Management of Your Supplier Ecosystem

Craft CEO and co-founder Ilya Levtov was joined by Aaron Parrott, Managing Director at Deloitte for a discussion on rethinking supplier management. 

They tackle a few key questions:

  • What do supply chains look like 18 months into the pandemic?
  • What lessons have companies taken away from this experience? 
  • How well does a company know what’s going on within its supply base?
  • How are organizations shifting their priorities around cyber?

Here are some of the takeaways:

Rethinking how to effectively manage the health of your supplier ecosystem

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chains around the world experienced disruption-the effects of which are still impacting suppliers and markets today. 

But what lessons have companies taken away from this experience? 

Parrott noted that very few companies will go back to the way things were before. The majority of companies fall into two camps: 

  1. Either looking into mitigation strategies and dabbling in more proactive management with some of their suppliers or,
  2. Focusing on full-on engagement with their suppliers. These companies take the posture that they never want to be put in this situation again and will take a multi-tier approach to supply chain management and intelligence to proactively mitigate risk within their supply base.

Visibility of your risk

Part of this new post-pandemic supply landscape is re-examining risk. And one of the big questions for supply chain leaders is “How well does their company know what’s going on within their supply base?”

When it comes to cybersecurity, “supply chain is the great unguarded flank of the enterprise,” says Levtov.

“We’re starting to see a shift in the manufacturing space,” says Parrot, “that cyber is much more important than just protecting my IP and […]making sure that no one is stealing it.” Now companies are recognizing that a cyberattack can potentially shut down their supply chain. 

So the question then becomes: How do you address it and when you identify a cyber attack in your supply network, what do you do?

Now more than ever, understanding and managing those risks within your supply chain is crucial to ensure resiliency. 

See the full session here. 

Lunch & Learn: How Hapag-Lloyd Re-Engineered Its Approach to Supplier Risk Mitigation and Supplier Transparency with Craft

Hapag-Lloyd is a global container line business with a significant supply chain consisting of 40,000 suppliers. To manage this large-scale supplier base, the company created a procurement team led by Ingmar Mester. 

We were excited to sit down with Mester at this event to discuss the challenges facing Hapag-Lloyd and how Craft’s unique supplier intelligence solution helped solve them.

Here are the highlights of our conversation:

What were some of the challenges you were facing before Craft?

The main problem they faced was a lack of supply market and supplier transparency. 

The company didn’t have a synchronized approach to collecting intelligence about the supply base, leading to confusion and missed opportunities. In some cases, suppliers fell through or were taken over without notice-leaving Hapag-Lloyd scrambling. 

“This really cost us money because we were not prepared and had to react quickly,” said Mester. “So at the end of the day, when I came in, [I] very quickly learned that there’s one big task: How can we set up a global source of data for facts and figures about our suppliers? And how can we become the first to know about any relevant news that happened?”

How is Craft supporting Hapag-Lloyd to solve these challenges?

Craft’s supplier intelligence solution helps Hapag-Lloyd stay informed and prepared to act on changing supplier landscapes. 

Mester says two main features stand out: 

  • Craft’s Company Profiles
  • Craft Alerts

Craft pulls together supplier details ranging from public financials to lesser-known public and private company and market news. This provides a comprehensive view of their supplier ecosystem. 

Craft Alerts provides real-time monitoring of their suppliers and notifies the team when there is news-ensuring they always have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips. 

“I always try to describe it to my colleagues in Hapag-Lloyd as sitting in the procurement armchair,” says Mester, “relaxed and waiting for the email from Craft to arrive whenever there is any news available in that Craft has detected.”

This gives Mester and the Hapad-Lloyd team peace of mind that they won’t miss important news or get overwhelmed searching through piles of data. 

“This saves us so much time that we can dedicate to added-value activities. And this will benefit all of Hapag-Lloyd.”

Presenting Use Cases on the Craft Portal

Mester then walked through various use cases of the Craft Portal, demonstrating the powerful ways Craft helps Hapag-Lloyd manage their supplier intelligence.

See the full presentation here.