Telco supply chain resiliency is a pressing issue for an industry under enormous pressure to achieve subscriber and network growth. Amid persistent inflation, higher interest rates, and broader macroeconomic uncertainty, telcos must navigate a variety of supply chain disruptions—including those triggered by lingering fallout from the pandemic, natural disasters, geopolitical turmoil, and labor shortfalls. 

 A recent roundtable at Digital Transformation World 2024 outlined the key challenges to this mission, and suggested some important strategies to enhance the integrity of the supply chain across national and corporate boundaries. 

Participants in the roundtable included Sarah Robles, deputy CEO of Tomorrow Street;  Stuart McMeechan, director of PwC; and Jay Gupta, Quantexa’s global head of telco solutions.  

Supply chain risks 

In order to properly devise a strategy, it’s important to first outline the risks the project faces. In the case of supply chain integrity, those risks are fourfold: geopolitical issues, regulatory compliance, supplier resilience, and the implementation of technology projects. 

Geopolitical risks, such as wars and embargoes, are a constant risk to supply chains, and can change with little notice, as international tensions flare. They’re not always predictable, in either timing or scope. "Covid-19 taught us the importance of actively monitoring supply chains,” says Robles. “In the blink of an eye, you can be in the middle of a global crisis." 

In addition, telcos can face issues with supplier resilience, as well as regulations and sanctions on their industries and the nations where they operate. And these risks are exacerbated when a telco is dependent on a particular supplier. 

"High dependency on suppliers without a backup plan poses a massive risk, especially in an unstable geopolitical environment," says Robles. These risks go beyond mere pricing considerations. For example, regulatory compliance violations by suppliers can impact the entire supply chain, while a supplier's unethical practices or environmental violations can damage a company's reputation. In all cases, contingency plans are necessary in the case of supplier disruptions. 

Adopting advanced technology to improve monitoring 

Despite these supply chain risks, only 15% of telcos monitor those risks on a continuous basis—and nearly 50% of telcos still rely on manual processes, despite the availability of advanced technologies. There is an urgent need for tools and methods to improve continuous monitoring. And yet in many cases the tools exist; what’s even more important are personnel with the data skills and platforms to analyze supplier profiles.  

"There's a wealth of data to understand the risk profile of suppliers,” says McMeechan, “but it’s partly about having the skills to interrogate that data and actually get value from it." 

Data integration challenges 

Part of the problem with using advanced technology to monitor supply chains is data integration, due to differences in the way data is structured by various teams and corporate branches. There’s a need for matching data across systems. (This isn’t a new problem; communication between teams has been an issue long before advanced technology entered the picture. This is just the latest iteration of an age-old difficulty.) 

Breaking it down, these challenges fall into three categories. The first is the use of multiple external data sets by telcos. Not all data is internal, and a significant portion comes from external sources. These external data sources often don't fit neatly into the existing variety of internal data analysis methods and tools. 

Second, there’s difficulty in integrating both structured and unstructured data. Telcos use a variety of different external datasets, but they struggle with data integration due to differences in data structure and matching. 

Third, there’s sometimes a difficulty in matching internal data sets for analysis, when they’ve been compiled by different teams. A compliance team has different priorities than a financial team or a cybersecurity team, and it may structure its data differently. Adapting to an issue found in monitoring might not be a quick process, since the adaptation will have to happen several times, instead of one fix for all. But with proper team collaboration on data structure, says McMeechan, "there's an opportunity to collect insights from different teams into one place, which can lead to efficiency gains and better risk management." 

Collaboration and investment 

The good news is, there is a growing trend of collaboration across different teams within organizations to enhance risk assessment. Additionally, 50% of telcos are planning to co-invest in technology solutions across different business units to continuously monitor and assess supply chain risk. These initiatives will also enhance operational efficiency, increasing revenue and lowering operational costs. 

"Telco procurement teams already conduct comprehensive surveys with over 150 questions to understand the security, political, and financial posture of a company before onboarding a supplier," says Robles. These surveys, if applied across the board, can help establish a baseline risk assessment for each supplier, to be modified as changing global or economic situations warrant. 

Effective navigation of supply chains 

One way to handle the difficulties of monitoring modern supply chains is to enable Quantexa's Decision Intelligence Platform. Not only does it allow third-party screening and contextual monitoring, but it also lets organizations proactively monitor their transactional data for potential instances of fraud, error, and non-compliance. Using its powerful advanced analytics capability, it connects multiple internal and external data sets, developing a single view of the data, enriched with intelligence about the relationships between people, organizations, and things. 

To find out more about using advanced technology to continuously monitor and assess supply chain risk, download How AI, Data, and Analytics Will Shape the Next Big Moves in Telecommunications. It examines how decision intelligence—the ability to access and bring together the most relevant data in the right context—can enable telcos to make more effective, data-driven decisions.