Supply Chain Resilience via Leading-Edge Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM)

Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) is instrumental in bolstering air and space superiority within military and defense operations. It plays a pivotal role in ensuring the uninterrupted flow of critical components and materials by enhancing resilience against disruptions caused by factors such as natural disasters, geopolitical conflicts, or supplier failures. One specific risk category, Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages (DMSMS), is of particular concern when it comes to ensuring availability of critical systems and platforms. DMSMS may result for many reasons including OEM stopping or reducing production of critical components, a company multiple tiers down in the supply chain going out of business, material shortages that may be caused by many factors (e.g. increasing demand, geopolitical issues). New technologies such as AI-enabled visibility and supply chain mapping offers promising and proven ways to potentially reduce risk related to DMSMS. Public Spend Forum, along with our partner Resilinc, provide leading-edge AI-enabled market intelligence and supply chain solutions that can significantly de-risk defense systems and supply chains and address the issues related to DMSMS by providing: 1.  Multi-tier visibility across the entire supply chain, mapping the location of every entity that manufactures, distributes, or touches critical parts or materials in any way. 2.  Alternative sources of supply (from over 4m enriched supplier profiles) that have the technical capability and potential to rapidly produce critical parts through re-tooling of existing plants or repurposing technology 3.  Identify alternative technologies and methods for producing parts (e.g. 3D manufacturing for critical forgings and castings) In this Phase I SBIR, Public Spend Forum we will perform a feasibility study to adapt, integrate, and enhance the ability for DAF to proactively manage DMSMS risk through multi-tier supply chain mapping, alternative source identification and technology discovery. We will leverage our existing commercial and defense solution and modify for specific DMSDM use cases.