Supply Chain Resilience

With the introduction of the Covid-19 pandemic and black swan events such as the 2021 Suez Canal obstruction, we saw the fragility of global trade and how ill-prepared many links in the supply chains are in terms of adaptability, change and crisis management and recovery processes. This eye-opener for many industry executives stresses the necessity for increased supply chain resilience (SCR). With an increased urgency to innovate at the corporate level, many opportunities for investing in startup solutions available in the market have arisen.

We tackle problems related to costs, forecasting, data, compliance, contingencies, embedding ESG, regulations and technology – all in partnership with Enterprise Singapore to harvest local solutions to solve these global SCR issues.

End-to-End Visibility

Supply chains have increased in depth and complexity, along with an increase in demand and expectations from consumers. The pure volume of suppliers across different tiers in the supply chain makes it challenging for companies to spot emerging risks, potential delays, and even cargo losses. Knowing key data in real-time can help actors make better decisions, prevent issues, and react more quickly to those that arise.

We investigate startup solutions in areas such as risk monitoring and mitigation, real-time tracking of goods and digitised paper trails to help improve visibility across the entire supply chain.

Supply Chain Automations

There is a vast need for increased automations in what is notoriously a very manual sector. Implementing changes in this area is challenging for a number of reasons, one of which being the substantial difference in technological infrastructure in ports around the world. Moreover, the amount of both independent and interdependent links in any supply chain makes automations challenging. However, there are opportunities to reduce turnaround times, reduce inefficiency and operating costs as well as minimising or eliminating human errors. We engage with solutions within agile and adaptive logistics, inspection robotics, workflow optimisation platforms and more.

Supply Chain Analytics

Similar to the challenges faced within end-to-end visibility, global supply chains experience insufficient or even an absence of key analytics data. This results in decisions being made on inadequate or even wrong insights, which can be disastrous for any enterprise. The need is apparent for better predictions and insights to enable smarter planning from production to transportation, storage as well as investments. Several avenues can be explored to innovate this area, such as supply and demand sensing, dynamic price optimisation and first- and last-mile planning.

Supply Chain Sustainability

Apart from the many urgent sustainability challenges faced within the shipping industry herein the regulatory and political decarbonisation pressure, this area also presents opportunities to make supply chains more resilient. By embedding sustainability into an enterprise’s core business, a wide range of benefits can be unlocked and tapped into. It is possible to streamline costs, reduce risk, and strengthen ties with critical stakeholders. Together with corporate and startup partners, we explore avenues such as fuel and energy efficiency, circular economy models as well as green packaging and materials.

Scope challenges

First, we scope the program cycle by identifying specific challenges faced by the corporate partners and distil them into 3 areas to be solved in the cycle through startup engagement pilots.

Identify solutions

We then scout and review hundreds of startups to shortlist the 5-10 most relevant and promising solutions that could meet the needs of partners’ priority challenges.

Select options

Third, corporate partners and shortlisted startups meet in group and 1:1 pitch sessions to evaluate the potential for collaboration. The 3-5 best matches will advance to address the challenges.

Design engagement

Lastly, we develop an engagement plan to ensure tangible cycle results. Corporate and startup partners agree on the intent to begin testing 1-3 engagements, concluding with a launch day.