Q News Intelligence for Supply Chain Monitoring

Cat_Mackay

This is an innovation prototype that lives solely in Q Labs. Q Labs products are experimental and pre-roadmap, as such they are for awareness and co-innovation interest only.

Q Labs Status: Experimentation

Background 

In today’s fast-paced and interconnected world, supply chains form the backbone of nearly every industry. Yet, with increasing complexity and globalization, maintaining visibility into these intricate networks has become more challenging than ever. Disruptions can arise from anywhere: geopolitical events, natural disasters, supplier issues, or even minute inefficiencies in logistics. For businesses to ensure resilience, efficiency, and sustainability, the ability to monitor and adapt their supply chains in real time is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. 

By viewing an organization's supply chain as a graph, with the organization as an entity in the middle, connected to it's tiers of suppliers, Quantexa is uniquely positioned to create a supply chain monitoring capability.

We combined Q’s News Intelligence, which delivers NLP-enriched news data from 80,000 global sources producing 1-2 million articles daily. With Q’s text2network which runs entity resolution on textual and unstructured data by extracting entities, identifying relationships between them, and assigning roles to each of these entities. Enabling us to:  

• Retrieve news articles about a supply chain.  
• Supplier focus: Identify financial disruptions, technological advancements, and operational disturbances that could impact suppliers, along with announcements of various innovations.  
• Geospatial focus: Detect environmental disasters and geopolitical events—including civil unrest, terrorism, and war—occurring in supplier locations. 
• Analyze article sentiment and flag anomalies by detecting unusually high volumes of news coverage.  
• Leverage Quantexa’s expert Entity Resolution and linking capabilities to provide a unified view of entities. 
• Utilize cutting edge LLMs to summarize key news articles, assess their potential impact and rank them on severity and likelihood.  
• Present these insights in an AI powered dashboard that integrates Quantexa's mature alerting framework and scoring models   

Ultimately, this creates Q’s News Intelligence for Supply Chain Monitoring. 

Our Prototype 

We have tested this prototype with Apple's supply chain since they publish it for public use yearly. We have kept the visualization generic to target multiple use cases but would love to have your feedback on how you would like to visualize this intelligence.  

https://player.vimeo.com/video/1060038030?h=395d9a9bd8&badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479

 

Supplier Focus: 

This view features an interactive bar chart that highlights anomalous values by event types for Apple’s suppliers. We have identified the highest anomalous category for these event types to immediately showcase the top supply chain risks. Users can interact with the chart by hovering over bars to reveal detailed news summaries from multiple sources. For instance, clicking on the dark green block in adverse events displays ”Luxur Precision Industry Company” and highlights a recent event where the supplier was accused of illegal operations in Taiwan, flagged as a high-risk issue. The impact analysis assesses potential disruptions to Apple's supply chain, including delayed component deliveries and reputational risks. Additionally, each supplier risk includes a severity and likelihood score, helping users filter and prioritize alerts within the dashboard. 

Geolocation Focus:  

This view emphasizes the geographical aspect of supply chain monitoring, featuring interactive maps that visualize news events impacting various regions. Each map categorizes events, providing insights into potential disruptions. Users can hover over points to reveal tooltips with more detail. For example, hovering over the large circle in the Infections and Infectious Diseases category for America, displays a recent outbreak of bird flu in Iowa, which led to a large-scale poultry culling. The impact analysis identifies several suppliers in the affected area who may face workforce shortages. The dashboard’s configurable event types allow users to track diverse risks, ensuring comprehensive supply chain awareness. 

Single Pane of Glass:  

This view features a comprehensive supply chain intelligence dashboard that integrates all insights into a single interface. On the left-hand side, a heat map visualizes suppliers with a color-coded, merged representation of previously analyzed geographical event maps. On the right-hand side, a prioritized summary displays high-impact events, sorted by severity and linked to key suppliers or critical geographic locations. For example, the flooding event in Bavaria appears first, followed by power outages in Puerto Rico, emphasizing major supply chain risks. This unified view enables users to quickly evaluate and address potential disruptions.   

Its Future 

As you can probably tell this prototype presents a world of opportunities and advancements, including making this real time, linking these insights back into Quantexa’s scoring framework and/or utilizing our graph capabilities to add another dimension to the information.  

We have many ideas for advancing this project and adding new features, but we greatly value your insights and feedback. Please connect below to express your interest in this initiative. 

Please click here to get in touch and leave us any feedback