Supply chain impact

When a critical supplier stops, the impact lands on a customer.
The chain between them is in no system.

Purchasing knows the contract, the supplier and the raw material. Operations knows which assembly lines that material feeds and which finished products come off them. Sales knows the portfolio and the customers holding orders. Each of the three is right, and none of them can answer the question the other two make possible: if this supplier fails today, which customers are hurt?

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Where the knowledge sits

The data is not missing. It is in three systems that were never joined.

ERP · purchasing

Purchasing

Contracts, suppliers, raw materials. Which agreement covers which component, and on what terms.

no join

ERP · production

Operations

The relationship between raw materials, assembly lines and finished products. What goes into what.

no join

CRM

Sales

The product portfolio and the customer base. Who ordered what, and when it was promised.

Three links in one chain, held in three systems, and the joins between them exist only in the heads of the people who have been there long enough. The problem is not a lack of data. It is the structural fragmentation of what the organisation knows.

Today

A simple question, answered in weeks.

Because the links are disconnected, answering it means:

01

Cross-functional meetings

02

Spreadsheets from three ERPs

03

Manual reconciliation

04

A dose of guesswork

The work is competent. The timing is the problem: an answer that takes weeks arrives after the customer has already noticed. By then the decision is not containment, it is apology.

One model, one query

Every entity becomes a node: the agreement, the component, the order, the customer.

Simulate the disruption of a supplier — Victory Bikes, in the Adventure Works model — and the agent walks the relationships upstream and downstream from that one node:

Impact simulation

Victory Bikes

Re-run traversal

Typed path

5 hops

Contract Register · Product Catalog · Operational Register

Victory Bikes

External Entity · Partner & Supplier

has party ←

Supply of Touring Tire Tube

Governance & Compliance · Agreement

is subject to ←

Touring Tire Tube

Physical Assets · Inventory & Material

depends on ←

SO70282

Business · Commercial Interaction

is placed by →

Dalton Adams

External Entity · Customer

impacted customer

Seconds, and what comes back is not a summary. It is a list you can act on:

What the traversal returns

4 findings

Adventure Works · demo tenant

1

raw material that will run short — Touring Tire Tube

1

active purchase order stalls

3

assembled products depend on that input

1

customer holding an order for them, and the account owner behind it

Five hops, and the agent inferred none of them. Each hop is a typed relationship somebody or some system already asserted. The chain crosses a third-party agreement, a component, a sales order and a person: four types, three departments, one query.

Risk, and what to do about it

The same traversal that finds the exposure asks whether there is a way out.

One hop further out is the part no summary reaches: whether the component has a second, pre-contracted source. For this one, it does not.

Inventory & Material

Touring Tire Tube

is subject to →

Agreement · and no other

1 agreement · Victory Bikes

And that absence is the finding: a single point of failure, named, with the orders and the customers it puts at risk. Where a second agreement does exist — as it does for the tyres this supplier also provides — the same traversal returns it, and the answer becomes an impact with a mitigation attached. Either way the answer is specific, and you did not have to know which case you were in before asking.

And because this is a state of the model rather than a report someone runs, it does not wait to be asked:

01

Detected

A component acquires a sole source. A delivery slips. An agreement approaches expiry.

02

Routed

To the person accountable for that agreement and to the owners of the accounts at risk — not to a mailbox.

03

Decided by a person

Redirect, requalify, or accept the exposure. The agent does not change the sourcing.

04

Recorded

What was decided, by whom, when, and against which state of the model.

Not a vague warning. A single point of failure, named — with the orders and the customers behind it.

Autonomy of attention, not of authority. The agent identifies, reports, monitors and escalates. It does not change your organisation.

What it takes

It answers what is in the model. Most of this you already have.

The agreements are in your purchasing system. The bills of material are in operations. The orders and the accounts are in sales. None of it has to be authored by hand — it is read in, and the nodes stay bound to the source they came from.

What is genuinely new is the joins between them, and they are typed once rather than reconciled per question. That is the work. It is also the reason the second question costs nothing: the traversal that answers a supplier failure is the one that answers a plant closure, a discontinued component, an expiring contract.

Ask it yourself

Weeks of manual tracing, or one question in plain language.

Adventure Works is fully modelled in the demo tenant — the supplier, the agreement, the component, the order and the customer. Ask it what a supplier failure reaches, and read the path it answers with.

see it running

Open the demo

One click with your work account. No form, no call.

Open the demo

or read the model

How it works

Typed nodes, typed relationships, lifecycle on both — why five hops cost the same as one.

How it works →