The world today is not a very safe place to be. With natural and manmade disasters becoming widespread, it becomes increasingly important for global businesses to have more insights into such incidents in order to mitigate supply chain risk. Irrespective of the industry a company is in, they have offices and vendors spread across the globe. With a global manufacturing base, it is difficult for any company with multiple locations and multiple suppliers to track potential disruptions to their supply chain on a daily basis. In order to track the incidents that might affect a company's business, the need of the hour is an all encompassing software solution for supply chain risk management.


However, most companies in U.S. put emphasis on supply chain management or logistics and do not focus on the physical risks. Risk management in supply chain today is about logistics, financial risk, physical risk and operational risk. Current solutions in the arena or physical risk are largely based upon home grown manual processes of collecting emails, spreadsheets, and databases. These ad-hoc, inconsistent solutions do not provide viable and sustainable systems to manage the supply chain risk as global networks expand. Razient combines all these features and answers the need of global companies by providing a process for managing supply chain risk.


Miami, Florida based Razient is a SaaS solution for compliance and physical risk management. It allows companies to gain insight into the risks that could adversely impact their local or global locations. By tracking all data about global disasters and incidents daily, Razient can automatically geo-locate company suppliers, customers, and partners to incidents, provide assessment of compliance risk, and provide crisis management mitigation steps.


At the helm of this revolutionary company is Gary Bahadur, Founder and CEO, who is an information security and technology industry veteran. His prior experiences in the field of security laid the ground work for building Razient. Bahadur assimilated the industry during his time as the co-founder and CIO of Foundstone, Inc, a $20 million security vulnerability risk management firm which was sold to McAfee for $86 million in 2004 and as an SVP of Bank of America. "From my experience in helping particular companies, we thought this would be a great way to launch a new service and a new product in an industry that does not have very good tools for disaster tracking and mitigation," explains Bahadur.

Mitigating Risk

Razient helps companies design a whole new framework of risk management for their global footprint. Clients can monitor potential supply chain incidents around the world that could impact key supply chain areas such as raw materials, work in process inventory, finished goods and support services. Their portal users gather and analyze information about their supplier networks and are provided with continuous alerting of various risk measurements.


The toughest part of any supply chain management software is the data gathering. Most companies today rely upon news reports to map risks back to their customers. This method is not accurate. "We have a rather different approach to the problem. The exorbitant amount of data that is being collected from numerous sources is put into our software. We then 'clean and scrub' it to make it more usable," explains Bahadur. Incident data is gathered hourly by their automated software and team of analysts. "We scour publicly available sources for global incidents, both large and small. Incidents are then grouped into different categories. Most companies track 3 or 4 types of incidents, but we track 60 different types of risks globally, making our information all encompassing."


The entire process is automated. A client only needs to input the locations they require and the rest of the work is done by Razient. The company sends push mails to clients in case of any incidents. The company provides an early warning system by collecting and disseminating incident data automatically in order to provide resources for timely response. The highly customizable service provides data specific to locations that are on the client's radar.


The service has also been designed with compliance issues in mind and it allows clients to do risk assessments from a physical side as well as from the vendors' location. It allows a company to assess whether their vendor are compliant with government regulations and industry best practices. The tool combines physical and logical risk management together, so clients do not require multiple tools; everything is combined on one dashboard.


The company's service is also available on a mobile platform. The application is available in Spanish and other language capabilities are in development.


Razient's solutions are built to be functional across many industries such as manufacturing, insurance, consulting services, physical security, automotive and retail.


The company recently launched a free android mobile application for tracking global incidents and disasters. Bahadur believes that the mobile aspect is really key and plans to build on it. "We help companies reduce their down time, which is a rather important aspect for any enterprise."