One has to love the marketing point riskmethods often makes about using its product – it’s fun to use. Really, how refreshing and unique and who says that research has to be drudgery. But make no mistake, riskmethods is a serious company that is offering a cloud-based supply chain and supplier risk solution that makes you sit up and pay attention.
riskmethods is a new company, having started in January 2013 and is headquartered in Munich, Germany. riskmethods’ approach is to catch all the risk information out there, put it into the business context of the their customers’ supply chains and provide the entire solution – monitoring, alerting, and analytics – as a service (SaaS).
Where riskmethods stands out is its ability to identify multi-tiers (not just first tier) of supplier production and transportation sites. It also monitors all types of risk found in the supply chain including supplier, country and location site. For information capture, different types of sources are integrated including their own risk research, internal systems, third-party information providers (both for fee and free), and “network share” which allows for informal sharing of information via a community of companies. The third-party information providers consist of credit agencies, global organizations and publishers of company and industry data. On a continuous basis, through screening, news events are captured and are ultimately transferred into threat risk data for the relevant risk objects of the supply chains. This data is represented visually via an interactive world map that models the supply chains.
Currently, riskmethods is on the market with their first module, Risk Radar, which identifies risk. In August they are planning to roll out the Impact Validator module, which assesses impact. Also coming down the road are the Action Planner (mitigate risks) and Scenario Simulation (simulate supply chains) modules.
This service is an interesting new addition to the supplier risk monitoring space and it is highly recommended for a closer look. Many thanks to Heiko Schwarz and Birgit Müller for the free trial and detailed demo.
