DP-DHL introduces Resilience360 tool to identify supply chain disruption risk

This year’s hurricane season has been devastating for the communities impacted by the series of storms so far in the Caribbean region, and disaster relief charities like Airlink and LIFT are providing shining examples of compassion in the midst of large losses. Even after the hurricane season finally ends, complete recovery will be a long process, with impacts that haven’t been considered yet by most people.

Deutsche Post DHL Group aims to encourage logistics providers to consider and prepare for impacts caused by events like hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, and has introduced a risk-management tool called DHL Resilience360 with the goal of allowing its customers “to detect future obstacles along the supply chain and take early actions to mitigate business risks,” says Tobias Larsson, the head of Resilience360, and DHL customer solutions and innovation.

Resiliance360 is a cloud-based platform that combines DHL’s risk exposure index, which is weighted across about 30 risk categories, with supply chain and business impact data from its customers to predict future obstacles.

In an example of the type of notice Resiliance360 provides, DHL said that analytics from the platform predicted shortages of chemicals surrounding widespread U.S. Gulf Coast production outages during Hurricane Harvey, and the likely impact of those shortages on the automotive, life sciences and healthcare and electronics industries. A company that needs those chemicals, and receives the prediction that production in and supply from the area could be cut off by the storm, could pre-order the necessary supplies ahead of time.

In addition to providing warnings about potential incidents, the platform is also designed to give insight on potential bottlenecks in the supply chain and sector-specific analysis based on risk profiles for geographically mapped suppliers. “We are currently looking into alternative re-routing suggestions as well as shipment delay predictions, to forecast the likelihood and the potential duration of shipment disruptions for risk events along transportation hubs,” says Rick Tillenburg, senior customer operations analyst at Resilience360.

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