Craft
Source of Truth on Companies

Consider this real-life example: a Fortune 100 manufacturer deals with 20,000 suppliers in its tier global supply chain. In 2019, the company saw the need to upgrade its supply chain management, with two objectives: improving risk monitoring and management, and acquiring advanced business intelligence (BI) yielding predictive insights on every member of its ecosystem of suppliers.

The enterprise chose Craft as the provider of data, analytics and insights for this supply chain solution.

During the onboarding, Craft noticed the manufacturer had active supply chain records for several thousand companies which either no longer existed or had merged with other companies. “10% of their supplier-list were either out of business, merged or acquired, and they were in the dark about these developments,” says Ilya Levtov, founder and CEO of Craft. Not knowing the corporate hierarchy of its
suppliers was only one of the problems. The client could not differentiate between the capabilities of various suppliers, and was aware of only the most basic information on the suppliers.

Today, each employee at the aerospace firm has access to cutting-edge intelligence on every company they are working with — across their supply chain, customer, and competitor ecosystems. Through advanced visibility into the supply chain, the client can track operational and financial metrics, management changes, corporate social responsibility data, cyber events, sanctions, blacklists and court filings, among others. Further, the predictive analytics component of Craft’s solution ensures the client is instantly notified about changes at the supplier, which may indicate instability, impending insolvency or simply - a structural change due to M&A.

Turning Your Supply Chain into a Profit Center Craft’s clients, like the aerospace manufacturer and other Fortune 500 enterprises, are turning their supply chain into a strategic profit center. By accurately comparing suppliers through indicators such as analyst estimates, developments in geographic locations and hiring, they are able to identify suppliers likely to be most productive. Additionally, they have gained leverage in contract negotiations with both existing and prospective suppliers— again, due to accurate and validated intelligence on the companies and industry sectors which facilitated benchmarking. “Craft intelligence also enables enterprises to reduce financial exposure from under performing partners while discovering untapped opportunities,” adds Levtov. To that end, clients can set up custom monitoring thresholds and track similar companies for immediate replacement of under performers. But what underlying factors help Craft’s clients turn their supply chain into a profit center?

Supply chain profitability is achieved through clients’ ability to tap into the alternative data offered by Craft’s solutions. Besides traditional indicators such as historical financial performance, Craft’s clients can examine human capital, operational metrics and KPIs, future plans, and social media sentiment. These data points, in conjunction with Craft intelligence, allows users to view companies from unique angles, discover previouslyinvisible opportunities, and improve their supply chain risk models without adding to their own data science team. More in-depth visibility into the performance of suppliers also means they can be monitored as a potential acquisition target. Levtov explains the benefits availed by data scientists, “Since they have access to clean, organized, and validated data on millions of companies, along with ML-assisted analytics tools that are easy to integrate with their enterprise systems, data scientists have more time to innovate.”

Craft intelligence also enables enterprises to reduce financial exposure from under performing partners while discovering untapped opportunities

How the Solutions Are Delivered
It begins with an onboarding phase where Craft reviews and analyzes the client’s supplier list, cleaning out any defunct records and resolving duplicate records to a master record for each individual company. Next, Craft learns about the client’s existing workflow, the systems users are already using, to recommend the optimal way to deliver and integrate its data and analytics. Craft can also determine an
optimal method to incorporate a client’s existing ERP data into the overall intelligence product.

After discovering the specific situation present with the client, Craft develops and deploys one of the following solutions:

Craft Intelligence Portal: The secure and customizable cloud-based solution allows enterprises to access Craft’s database through a web-based portal. The intelligence portal provides clients with insights across company locations, financials, operating, and human capital metrics. It provides alerts on changes in market valuation, funding, financial metrics, headcount, notifications about new court filings, blacklist additions, and data breaches. Users have access to customizable dashboards for company tracking and unlimited use across the enterprise.

Application Programming Interface (API): The Craft API equips clients with the Craft data platform, through which they can access all of Craft’s API endpoints, including Company Data API to gather a pool of organizational data and Alerts API to receive timely alerts. All the data Craft structures on companies—including 300+ types of data (financial, operations, human capital, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), compliance-related) — can feed into the enterprise via an API in their data lake or existing business intelligence workflow. Craft utilizes GraphQL, which provides a complete and clear description of the data in its API. This type of API enables clients to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more.

Enterprise Integrations and Applications
Craft intelligence is also available in a number of enterprise applications such as Coupa, Salesforce and SAP. It can be also integrated into any enterprise workflow on a case by case basis.

With Craft, enterprises dramatically improve their visibility into their supply chain, while also reducing supplier review time. For perspective, Craft offers intelligence that encompasses rich, deep, up-to-date supplier profiles based both on financial and alternative data.

This alternative, i.e. not purely financial data and insight, are hallmarks of Craft. Levtov says, “Until recently, alternative data was used almost exclusively by financial services firms. Craft is bringing the power of Wall Street alternative data to Main Street enterprise users. Craft regularly adds new data types, most recently - global lists of blacklisted companies, legal compliance with anti-slavery mandates, and environmental impact of suppliers. To help clients discover new clients/suppliers, Craft will the search capabilities of its solution. Levtov says, “For example, if someone searches for ‘manufacturers of xyz type of hexagonal boat in North America,’ they will instantly get validated results.