MAKING SUPPLY CHAINS

RESILIENT, TRANSPARENT, SECURE & ETHICAL:

INSIGHTS FROM BINDIYA VAKIL,

CEO OF RESILINC & AN INDUSTRY INNOVATOR

Calabasas, October 11, 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerability of the global supply chain of healthcare and heightened the challenge of being resilient and agile while mitigating risk. A proactive approach where monitoring events and providing intelligence through visibility in the supply chain is coming to the rescue of the industry. Devendra Mishra, the Executive Director of BSMA, had the unique opportunity to interview Bindiya Vakil, the CEO and Co-founder of Resilinc, a leader for supply chain visibility and resiliency intelligence and analytics.

Bindiya Vakil has helped transform the way that global organizations approach supply chain visibility and risk, driving them to shift from reactively addressing catastrophic supply

chain events to putting preventative solutions in place through monitoring, mapping, and planning. She is a founding member of the Global Supply Chain Resiliency Council and a

member of the Advisory Board of MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Vakil holds a master’s degree in supply chain management from MIT and an MBA in Finance. She was named Supply Demand Chain Executive’s inaugural Woman of the Year and has appeared on nationally syndicated TV, radio and print media speaking on the topic of supply chain resiliency.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE INTERVIEW

MISHRA: In the post COVID-19 pandemic world, we have not only realized how dependent we are on the links of the global supply chain to save human lives, we also currently face an inordinate number of disruptions caused by natural disasters, wars, political upheavals, infrastructure breakdowns, capacity constraints in case of demand shocks, industrial strife, and cyber security threats. How uniquely positioned is Resilinc to help an enterprise improve its resiliency?

VAKIL: While the supply chain disruptions of the past two and a half years have certainly been a wake-up call, the truth is, supply chain risk and disruption will continue. Whether it is geopolitical, weather-related, shortages of labor, or cyber security breaches, no supply chain is risk-free. Organizations can no longer afford the “wait and see” approach; otherwise, it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole moving from one disruption to another.

As the global leader in supply chain mapping and risk monitoring, Resilinc is empowering organizations around the world to build resilience in their supply chains; to go from reactive to proactive. Our risk mitigation approach is comprehensive and powered by 12 years of supplier-validated data, and this is what sets us apart: the number of suppliers and sub-tier suppliers we have mapped spans 1M sites and 4M parts and raw materials. This enables companies to gain nth-tier visibility quickly when disruption strikes.

MISHRA: What have you learned in your ten plus years of existence about inherent risks in the supply chain of industries you serve that are relevant to BioPharma?

VAKIL: Supply chain disruptions are a fact of life. Over the last decade we have seen catastrophic earthquakes, flooding, nuclear disasters, and fires; all have blindsided supply chains. But it is not all doom and gloom, especially if we learn from them. COVID-19 for example, vividly revealed the vulnerabilities baked into lean, cost-optimized supply chains. It also highlighted the need for building supply-chain-resilience capabilities. During the pandemic, companies that had solid monitoring and supplier mapping capabilities — down to the sub-tier site and part level — had a complete picture of how the evolving crisis would affect their supply chains. This helped companies take action before the disruption hit. Some of our customers were able to avert any negative impact.

Part-site mapping has been the key to resilience well before the pandemic. For example, one of Resilinc’s global biotech customers leveraged part-site mapping to avoid supply disruptions after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017. Before Maria made landfall, the firm was able to identify two Puerto Rican sites that supplied 25 to 30 items to its North American manufacturing operations. Assuming these sites would be compromised, the company made several million dollars’ worth of forward purchases from alternative suppliers that averted what would have been costly delays in manufacturing. By contrast, Hurricane Maria left similar companies floundering for weeks trying to analyze which suppliers and materials would be impacted; many subsequently faced allocations and paid large premiums to secure constrained inventory. In the aftermath of Maria, hospitals also struggled for many months to obtain adequate supplies of IV bags.

"Measuring resilience starts with knowing the players across your supply chain and then assessing them for risk. Typically, the task of assessing supplier risk is dispersed throughout an organization: one team looks at suppliers’ CSR and sustainability performance, while others measure product quality data and cybersecurity. There is no cohesive process when it comes to designing questionnaires, requesting information, manually reviewing data, drawing

conclusions, and prioritizing - as a company - which supplier risks to tackle first. So, hidden weaknesses persist, ultimately leading to costly disruptions." ~ BINDIYA VAKIL, CEO OF RESILINC

MISHRA: What kind of intelligence are you capturing to make Resilinc an exceptional solution for mitigating certain risks?

VAKIL: We have collected proprietary data directly from suppliers and sub-tier suppliers over the last 12 years, spanning 1 million supplier sites and part-origin intelligence for 4M+ parts and raw materials across 20 industries. We also offer 24/7 monitoring of risk events across millions of news and social feeds. Our system alerts customers of potential disruptions across suppliers, sites, and materials in real time and provides data-backed insights regarding appropriate actions to take. With all this intelligence and data, we can offer AI-powered predictive solutions to predict delivery delays, price movements, and supply constraints for raw materials and commodities—before they happen.

MISHRA: What is supply chain mapping and monitoring of an organization mean and what

value does it yield?

VAKIL: To put it simply, you cannot fix what you cannot see. Mapping your supply chain down to sub-tier levels not only gives you visibility but also gives you the invaluable ability to make early and informed decisions when disruption occurs. Mapping gives you transparency into where your products come from, down to the raw material level. This, coupled with an ‘always on’ real-time monitoring system, gives customers an early warning of any potential disruptions to their supply chain. Companies that are mapping and monitoring have data at their fingertips to pivot, find an alternate site, and continue business with far less inventory/revenue loss.

MISHRA: In the healthcare industry, how can an enterprise, consisting of its own network of

manufacturing plants, CROs, CMOs, suppliers and their suppliers, distributors,

pharmacies, and hospitals, assess their current degree of resilience.

VAKIL: Measuring resilience starts with knowing the players across your supply chain and then assessing them for risk. Typically, the task of assessing supplier risk is dispersed throughout an organization: one team looks at suppliers’ CSR and sustainability performance, while others measure product quality data and cybersecurity. There is no cohesive process when it comes to designing questionnaires, requesting information, manually reviewing data, drawing

conclusions, and prioritizing - as a company - which supplier risks to tackle first. So, hidden weaknesses persist, ultimately leading to costly disruptions.

A better method is to use one process and platform to assess your suppliers across all risk types. Resilinc’s customers enjoy superior risk assessment capabilities by leveraging our supplier data which incorporates more than 500k supplier firms, one million sites owned or used by suppliers, covering 4 million parts and materials (with all this logged into our database, it is likely that many of your suppliers are already in our network). We also offer automated tools for a company to perform comprehensive supplier risk assessments to obtain data on lower-tier suppliers; identify previously hidden risks; and even prioritize mitigation actions. With a single process and platform to measure supplier risk types, it is easier to generate a

combined risk (or resiliency!) score based on your own criteria of which risk areas are most important to you.

Whether a company uses a vendor or its own staff to drive a unified supplier risk assessment process, some common principles and best practices should be applied:

Assign a single person or team to run the risk assessment program
Integrate all your supplier risk assessment data in one platform or application
Prioritize risk areas based on business KPIs
Keep an eye out for opportunities to collaborate with suppliers
Do not overburden your suppliers with requests for information

MISHRA: How have you incorporated AI in the technology-driven services you offer and with what benefits?

VAKIL: We have invested extensively in AI models that provide real-time, proactive, and predictive solutions for supply chain risk. As an example, Resilinc’s 24/7 global event monitoring Artificial Intelligence, EventWatch AI, gathers information and monitors news on 400 different types of disruptions across 104 million sources including traditional news sources, social media platforms, wire services, videos, and government reports. Annually, the AI contextualizes and analyzes nearly 5 billion data feeds across 100 languages and countries, making EventWatch AI the industry’s largest, most comprehensive supply chain risk monitoring portfolio. To ensure supply chain resiliency, companies need to be able to detect disruptions promptly, understand the impact, and act quickly. Our technology allows just that. Leveraging twelve years of rich, annotated news, we have trained the EventWatch AI to sift through billions of data sources, flag relevant events, and alert customers about a potential disruption. Through the power of reinforced learning, the AI continues to get smarter as it processes a continually increasing volume of news. When this type of monitoring is layered with multi-tier supply chain

mapping, customers have unmatched visibility into where a disruption is occurring and the impact it will have across the entire network, all the way from parts and raw materials to the customers’ customers.

Our technology can even predict if a purchase order is going to be late. We have trained the AI to tell an organization which purchase orders are likely to be delayed and by how long and propose a risk-mitigation plan. This technology enables organizations to get ahead of potential purchase order delays and put contingencies in place. It also helps organizations save on costs – they can make educated, data-backed decisions about duplicating a purchase order and keep excess inventory at bay.

About Resilinc

Resilinc was founded with the purpose to strengthen global supply chains, making them resilient, ethical, transparent, and secure. Its technology-driven solutions create an ecosystem where organizations have unmatched visibility into their supply networks and can collaborate with their suppliers in a transparent environment. Since its launch in 2010, Resilinc has defined the supply chain mapping, monitoring, and resiliency space worldwide. With over 500k suppliers and sub-tier suppliers mapped across 200 countries, spanning 1M sites and 4M parts and raw materials, the company is the first line of defense for customers, helping them navigate supply disruptions.

Website: www.resilinc.com

About BSMA

BSMA - Driving Innovation in the Life Sciences Supply Chain

Since its inception in 2007, BSMA is a global organization that fosters Innovation and Adoption of disruptive technologies within the end-to-end supply chain of the Life Sciences industry. With offices in California (USA), Brussels (Belgium), and Mumbai (India), BSMA promotes collaboration and networking between professionals of the biotech, pharmaceutical, academic, and medical diagnostics enterprises. The Alliance partners with industry, academia, foundations, suppliers, technology enablers, research institutions, trade organizations, and the government to improve productivity, quality, product and service integrity, risk mitigation, managerial talent development, and patient care globally. It is also the home of start-up companies engaged in business development and scale-up.

CONTACT: Devendra Mishra, Executive Director,

Phone: 818-224-1552

Email: devendra@biosupplyalliance.com