Market Intelligence Platform Enabling A $2B Manufacturer Of Crop Protection Solutions To Manage Supplier Risk

The South-Asian arm of a global leader in crop protection solutions was managing the procurement of raw materials for production from over 1600 suppliers across China, India, Brazil, and 18 other countries. Production schedules were dependent on supplier health and negative events such as bankruptcy, litigation or regulatory fines could hamper the whole production line. The company wanted an online competitive intelligence tool to monitor risk events for its suppliers in real-time and notify plant managers and location heads across countries.

The client approached Contify to develop a centralized competitive intelligence platform that could track all their suppliers, organized by classification type (intermediates, packaging, etc.). Contify configured a multi-lingual platform to track suppliers across geographies, with the ability to notify plant managers of events that could get impacted by negative events on a supplier.

• Configured a custom white-labeled platform with taxonomy mapped against supplier classification
• Identified sources for negative news on suppliers — news and regulatory websites, legal search engines
• Sourced information from across geographies in local languages and created a translated copy in English
• Created a risk dashboard for plant managers by mapping corresponding suppliers
• Set up alerts for real-time notifications on negative news on suppliers
• Developed concise monthly round-up reports on supplier risk events

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There were two big challenges in addressing this problem. First, most of the companies were not actively covered in media, and finding information on them required custom sourcing with industry knowledge. Secondly, the localization of information posed a challenge that was addressed through a customized platform supplemented by manual curation in multiple languages.

Contify’s alerts helped the plant managers to stay abreast with the risk associated with their suppliers and act quickly in case of a negative event. In 3 months, Contify delivered more than 41 high risk alerts on suppliers which could have significantly impacted production.