Enhance your Supply Chain Security Program with Street-Level Intelligence

It’s great to be back on the road.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with a number of supply chain professionals at a conference in New Jersey. Attendees ranged from industry veterans to innovative vendors shaping the future of technology in this space and it was refreshing to feel the buzz from in-person collaboration again. Getting a chance to meet a wide range of experts, I left with a few key takeaways:

• Supply chain security is a 24/7 job and like most security groups is often under resourced
• Threats facing supply chain are dynamic, and the bad guys are smarter than you think
• Technology in this industry is evolving quickly to bring real time visibility to supply chain teams and better protect cargo in transit
• People outside of the trucking industry should never complain about parking

A major influence on each of those points is cargo theft which continues to be a problem around the world.  The tactics, techniques, and procedures that criminals use continue to evolve and the industry is working overtime to stay in front of them. There are three things that make this a particularly tough problem to solve.

Supply Chain Challenges

Intelligence - Cargo theft is chronically underreported for a number of reasons, as a result we don’t always know the full extent of the problem in certain geographical areas.

Time - There are only so many resources to go around.  It takes a tremendous amount of time to plan against cargo theft and follow through with investigations once it’s occurred.

Parking - There is simply not enough secure parking.  In the event of a full facility or absence of secure parking altogether, there is no easy way for suppliers or drivers to understand the risk profile of the areas they choose to stop in.

Based on these challenges and through conversations with industry experts, there are a few ways that street-level intelligence can help supply chain security teams turn the corner to becoming more proactive and work to mitigate risk of cargo theft.  While there are no silver bullets in security, there is an opportunity here to use data differently to help forecast risk and better protect people and assets across the supply chain.

Understanding trends around critical nodes

According to the Sensitech 2021 Cargo Theft Intelligence Report, theft from facilities has been on the rise over the last two years.  With many critical nodes in a supply chain, it can be hard to keep up with the evolving threat landscape in each of these locations. As the crime profile of cities around the world continues to change, trends in relevant crimes such as robbery, armed robbery, and auto theft can be key indicators of an increased or decreased threat to your facility or cargo in these locations. Monitoring sites for these trends can help inform security operations decisions that allow you to stay ahead of threats both at and around the facility.

Identifying safe stops and secure parking alternatives

Supply chain security intelligence is heavily focused on identifying hotspots of cargo theft around the world. This intel is largely driven by cargo-specific data and is often concentrated at the city level.  It’s important to understand where hotspots are and plan routes accordingly, but whether it's last mile or mid route there are times when you have no choice but to park near high-risk locations. With secure parking facilities in high demand (and a lack of standardization in what that really means), trucking companies turn to yards and commercial lots that can present an elevated threat level and put cargo at risk. Focusing on the crime profile of both the immediate vicinity as well as the neighborhoods surrounding these yards will help plan routes more effectively, make drivers more risk aware, and ultimately put organizations in a better position to avoid an incident.

Route planning with distribution partners

Forward-thinking security leaders are starting to roll security specific addendums into contracts with third parties. These contracts can include things like physical descriptions of vehicles being used, technology required onboard, and location-based guidelines. Identifying those high-risk areas along routes, whether at the city level or yard level can help solve a number of problems before they occur. Proactively including these into your contracts to manage time spent in these locations can help avoid risk and put you in a better position to hold partners accountable or even recoup costs associated with violations.

Street-Level intelligence is powered by data, and much of this data is available to security teams today if they know where to look. Base Operations takes care of the heavy lifting by bringing in both open and closed-sourced intelligence to visualize data in a way that helps security teams cut to the core of their analysis. If you’d like to learn more about how Base Operations is using big data to deliver a threat intelligence platform that supports all areas of the security team, feel free to reach out.

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