Tackling Supply Chain Uncertainty

Executive Summary

• CORE is a 50 million euro initiative, coordinated by the European Shippers Council, and involving over 70 partners from Europe and the USA.
• MJC² has developed software tools to help shippers and logistics operators plan for disaster scenarios and disruptive events in the supply chain, optimizing contingency plans and resilience strategies.
• CORE provides real-time logistics scheduling systems to allow faster, more efficient response to actual events should they occur.
• The tools help deal with many of the issues that are affecting global supply chains: congestion in ports, blocked trade lanes/routes, uncertainty in lead times, etc.
• The project has been supported by the European Commission's FP7 Programme.

Resilience to Supply Chain Disruption

Shippers and logistics operators all over Europe, and indeed globally, are spending time (and not inconsiderable amounts of money) analysing and reacting to supply chain disruptions. The concerns are well-documented: congestion at ports, impact on transhipment operations and new barriers to trade, to mention just a few.

Technology-Driven Solution

A major supply chain research initiative, known as CORE, offers a solution which goes some way to addressing these concerns.

Artificial Intelligence, interoperable data pipelines and sophisticated detection & tracking technologies are just some of the innovations coming out of CORE.

Specifically, CORE provides powerful AI-based logistics optimization tools, developed by logistics software innovators MJC², designed to deal with uncertainty in multimodal global supply chains.

At the strategic level, CORE allows different scenarios to be modelled and optimized with a touch of a button. For example "what if Dover-Calais transit times increase by X%?", "what is the best alternative port?" or "do port X's rail connections make it more attractive than port Y?"

Real-time Management

Furthermore, tactically and operationally, CORE can respond to actual disruptions in the supply chain, e.g. dynamically re-routing freight in response to a major problem in a port, or the closure of an important rail connection.

In this way CORE gives shippers and logistics operators a powerful solution to not only plan ahead for different scenarios, but also to react quickly to unforeseen events and their consequences.

What is CORE?

CORE, which refers to "Consistently Optimized REsilient" global supply chains, set out with the target of developing new technologies and algorithms to make supply chains more resilient to disasters and other major disruptive events.

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes were contemplated, as well as severe disruptions such as port congestion and industrial disputes.

Contingency plans can be made, but each one is very time-consuming to develop, and in the current climate of uncertainty there could be many scenarios that need to be considered.

A key innovation is the LARG+O real-time supply chain software toolset developed by MJC². LARG+O stands for Lean Agile Resilient Green & Optimized, referring to the principles underlying its aims.

Responding to Disruption

A good example of LARG+O in action is how it responds to congestion problems in major European ports, or disruptions to the rail network caused by infrastructure damage.

For the shippers who rely on these connections, the delays impact on import and export operations to most parts of the World.

LARG+O reacts as follows:

• Predict the impact on inventories throughout the supply chain (at the SKU level);
• Automatically choose alternative multimodal routes, e.g. via different ports or on different services, that are the most cost-effective;
• Analyse the resulting impact of the mitigation strategy on costs and service level.

At the strategic level, the LARG+O simulation toolset can be used by the shipper to test the robustness of their supply chain to events such as labour disputes, severe weather or political problems.

LARG+O allows these scenarios to be modelled in minutes, exploiting powerful multimodal supply chain optimization algorithms to develop efficient logistics solutions.

Does it work?

The collaboration of high-tech developers such as MJC² with real-world shippers and logistics operators has led to a suite of optimization tools that are both highly innovative and practicable.

Apart from the strategic optimization and resilience that CORE provides, operational cost savings for shippers and transport operators are substantial, not to mention the increased agility to respond to more commonplace disruptions such as delays, poor weather and other events which occur daily.