How Does Z2Data Unspaghetti Your Supply Chain Visibility?

From the COVID-19 pandemic to the agricultural fallout from the Russia-Ukraine War to the cavalcade of container ships under siege in the Red Sea, the past half-decade has cogently demonstrated the complexity, interdependence, and staggering sprawl of the global supply chain. Because of the extent of globalization and the ways it has facilitated specialization in manufacturing and production, large companies all over the world now depend on hundreds or even thousands of suppliers for their parts, components, and subassemblies. 

A 2020 study by McKinsey & Company found that the average technology company has around 125 tier-one suppliers, and over 7,000 across all its tiers. Auto manufacturers rely on even denser, more voluminous networks, with an average of 350 tier-one suppliers and upwards of 18,000 manufacturers across its full supply chain. Management consulting firm The Hackett Group framed the burgeoning scale of supply chains in a different but equally useful way: according to its research, for every $1 billion a company spends, it has roughly 3,000 suppliers. 

While undoubtedly conferring a variety of advantages, supply chains of this magnitude also carry a number of significant hazards in tow. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that have thousands of suppliers face a much higher risk of disruption than their 20th century counterparts, who relied on a fraction of that to manufacture their products. Complex supply chains mean more potential bottlenecks, more single points of failure, more vulnerabilities to natural disasters, factory shutdowns, and cyberattacks. 

In addition to these longstanding forms of disruption, the current expansion of environmental regulations worldwide—embodied by directives like CSRD, CSDDD, and the EPA’s PFAS reporting rule—presents an additional challenge for OEMs that rely on complex sourcing operations. Businesses working to comply with these new sustainability laws may have to calculate carbon emissions, identify the raw materials used in individual components, and carry out comprehensive due diligence throughout their supply chains. Suffice it to say, the more suppliers an organization has, the more challenging adhering to these environmental obligations is going to be. 

Fortunately, there’s a single, overarching common denominator essential to companies’ efforts to manage all these challenges: supply chain visibility. By maximizing their supply chain visibility, OEMs and other businesses can see the full constellation of threats and implement mitigation strategies accordingly. Further, they’re able to react to disruptions with greater agility and precision, and be more equipped to comply with the raft of emerging sustainability directives. Companies that see the full sweep of their value chain—and not just loose fragments and unconnected puzzle pieces of everything below their tier one—are positioning themselves to cultivate the type of supply chain resilience that offers a palpable competitive advantage over their peers. And one of the single most effective ways to achieve this type of supply chain visibility is by bringing on Z2Data’s supply chain risk management (SCRM) platform. 

Use Part-to-Site Mapping to See Your Full Supply Chain 

A suite of industry-leading tools for OEMs and other companies that source electronic components, Z2Data enables customers to access, examine, and analyze their supply chains with precision and comprehensiveness. 

One of these tools, Supply Chain Watch, contains a powerful feature called part-to-site mapping. Drawing on its exhaustive internal databases, Z2Data allows companies to see the full supply chain trajectory of their parts, beginning with manufacturing location and ending with final assembly sites. Crucially, Part-to-Site Mapping traces parts to manufacturing locations for more than just a company’s tier one suppliers, too—the functionality can also be used for the sub-tiers that so many OEMs struggle to identify. 

Benefits of Part-to-Site Mapping 

Supply Chain Watch and its part-to-site mapping feature provides organizations with a complete view into where their components are made. This data—which pinpoints suppliers, geographical locations, and specific manufacturing sites—adds value in a range of meaningful, actionable ways. 

• Know the country of origin (CO) for all your parts.
• Respond swiftly and decisively to natural disasters and other major manufacturing disruptions.
• Assess your vulnerability to geopolitical tensions, trade wars, and other asymmetrical conflicts between nations. 
• Analyze the entire manufacturing process for your components, identifying inefficiencies and potential areas ripe for improvement or optimization. 

Unlock Maximum Transparency with Supplier Insights 

Complete supply chain visibility goes beyond knowing where your parts are being manufactured and the route they take along the supply chain to reach your factories and warehouses. It also entails having a thorough understanding of your suppliers—one that digs beneath the purchase orders, receipts, and other transaction documentation and gives you a granular picture of the company you’re doing business with. 

Read Also: What Should a Good Risk Analysis of Semiconductor Suppliers Include? (Part 1) - Z2Data

Z2Data’s Supplier Insights provides that type of deeper supply chain visibility by offering extensive profiles on tens of thousands of companies in industries ranging from electronic components to semiconductor manufacturing to raw material extraction. These profiles provide a clear, consolidated view into decisive supplier data, including financial fundamentals, compliance status, key products, and manufacturing locations, among other details. Companies that use Supplier Insights can even opt to receive real-time alerts on major organizational changes and other developments, including mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcy filings. Finally, Z2Data uses a wealth of data and sources, along with a proprietary algorithm, to create supplier risk scores intended to give customers a concise gauge of the relative stability of the company. 

Benefits of Supplier Insights 

Supplier Insights can be a highly effective tool for any company that recognizes the long-term value of knowing its suppliers and their potential vulnerabilities in a highly detailed, data-rich way. 

• Access information on a prospective supplier’s financials, operational stability, and compliance status before entering into a binding contract. 
• Use holistic, all-encompassing risk scores during risk assessments, and when selecting between manufacturers. 
• See beyond an organization’s headquarters and analyze detailed maps of their manufacturing locations, allowing you to carefully weigh the potential for geopolitical instability. 
• Carry out side-by-side comparisons of potential suppliers, juxtaposing factors like risk, product lines, and manufacturing locations. 

Visualize the Risks Lurking Beneath Tier One with Sub-Tier Intelligence 

Only around a fifth of companies have good visibility into their tier two suppliers, and that figure plummets into the single digits in the third tier and beyond. Z2Data’s Sub-Tier Intelligence provides businesses with the data and technology to buck those statistics and gain comprehensive visibility into their deep-tier manufacturers. Using Sub-Tier Intelligence, OEMs are able to carry out the kind of in-depth supply chain mapping that can have a transformative impact on a company’s SCRM. In addition, the tool’s material analysis feature allows customers to plug in a component and access detailed information on where its raw materials are coming from. Organizations can utilize these assessments to gain a deeper understanding of material and geographical dependencies, sourcing vulnerabilities, and single points of failure. 

Benefits of Sub-Tier Intelligence 

OEMs with the supply chain visibility to see beyond their tier one have a higher degree of control and even mastery over their suppliers, enabling them to cultivate resilience, responsiveness, and even leverage in business partnerships. 

• Identify sub-tier suppliers that may be banned, noncompliant, or otherwise high-risk.
• Recognize the components and manufacturers in your supply chain that are subject to UFLPA regulations. 
• Go beyond the level of components and see where your company’s raw materials are coming from. 
• Get real-time risk monitoring that alerts you to major events affecting sub-tier manufacturers, including sanctions, special designations by federal agencies, and other crucial trade restrictions. 

See Your Components From Every Angle with Part Risk Manager

In the dynamic, multifaceted world of electronic components, parts are so much more than just specs and parametric features. When selecting and sourcing components, the most experienced, diligent procurement professionals want to know everything from lifecycle status and obsolescence risk to environmental compliance and market availability. Z2Data’s Part Risk Manager recognizes that supply chain visibility extends to the parts themselves and the wealth of invisible data that accompanies them. To that end, it provides customers with a raft of meaningful intelligence for over one billion components. 

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Benefits of Part Risk Manager

For OEMs in industries like automotive, aerospace, and consumer electronics, gaining maximum visibility into electronic components can mean the difference between building BOMs that last and having to prematurely replace parts that fall into noncompliance or obsolescence. Part Risk Manager is a software tool designed explicitly to achieve this type of visibility. 

• Search over one billion parts in the Z2Data parts database.
• Carry out effective BOM management.
• Search for cross-references based on a range of different criteria, including form-fit-function. 
• Make pivotal decisions using Z2Data’s proprietary lifecycle forecasting, a tool whose reliability is borne out by a historical accuracy of 90%. 

Disentangle Dense, Knotty Supply Chains and Gain Visibility and Transparency

When it comes to the globalization of industrial supply chains, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. While some businesses may embrace nearshoring, onshoring, and “slowbalization” trends, no sourcing decisions are going to dramatically reduce the number of suppliers OEMs rely on to manufacture their products at the price and scale today’s markets demand. Because of this, the best these organizations can hope to do is shed light on broader swaths of their supply chains, illuminating sub-tier suppliers, manufacturing locations, parts data, and potential chokepoints. Even in complex, multifaceted supply chains, intelligence like this can guide shrewd SCRM decisions and the effective cultivation of operational resilience. 

Z2Data can help companies achieve this level of comprehensive supply chain visibility. To learn more about the platform’s repertoire of tools, visit the website or schedule a free demo.