On Monday, we introduced you to Resilinc, a new player in Supply Management that provides a Decision Support System (DSS) for identifying and evaluating risks in your supply chain if you are in the high-tech, medical device, and automotive space and have vast multi-tier supply chains.

We noted that Resilinc is unique in that it is able to provide an overall risk score, delivered in terms of the relative revenue impact of a disruption, for each location and each product; give you the ability to determine the impact of an external event in a given location with respect to specific supplier locations and sourced products; and identify with locations and products are likely to be impacted by a significant event anywhere in the world as soon as it happens. But we didn’t address another aspect of why Resilinc is unique and why they might shake up the risk management space.

Resilinc was founded, and the technnology was designed, and built, by risk management practitioners in the high-tech / device supply chains, and they have added experts in the medical device and automotive supply chains. One of the difficult, and unique, aspects about risk management is the differences in impact and effect of a supply disruption across industries. In some industries, like automotive, bringing a production line back up is not as simple as getting the missing parts or raw materials; in others, like electronic manufacturing, it’s not as simple as substituting one microchip for another if they have different input/output and voltage specs; and in others still, like medical device, it’s not as simple as switching suppliers when one runs out of production capacity as the industry is heavily regulated and it is often the case that all suppliers must carry certain certifications and insurance policies. Without practitioners who understand the specific requirements, and the differing severities associated with each type of disruption, you never get the right models. And if you don’t have the right models, you have zero chance of producing the right metrics and measurements.

For example, the founder, Bindiya Vakil, has served as the Program Manager for Supply Chain Risk Management at Cisco and the Supply Chain Manager at Solectron. Summit Vakil has worked in product management and leadership roles in Brocade, Cisco, and 3Com.

In addition, they recognize the criticality of solid Supplier Information Management as a foundation, and brought in Jon Bovit, with a long history in SIM at Ariba, Aravo, and CVM, to insure they got their unique functionality-focussed SIM model right for the problem they are tackling, which is different from the problems the standard SIM players are focussed on. (For example, in risk management, it really doesn’t matter where the headquarters are and whether you spend 100K or 100M with the supplier. A hurricane could shut down the headquarters and have no effect on your supply chain but if a supplier is sole source, even if you only buy one part, and only spend 100K, if the absence of that part could shut down the production line, that supplier is still a huge risk if they are located in a high risk zone.)

And their CEO is formally trained in Supply Management. She has a Master of Engineering in Logistics from MIT with a thesis on Design Outsourcing in the High-Tech Industry and its Impact on Supply Chain Strategies. Not many companies these days have a CEO who is technically competent in what the company actually does. It is my belief that having a CEO who knows what the product has to do, and how it should do it, greatly increases the chances that the company will develop the right products. (Because when you don’t, you get devices that light-up when they’re off and drain the battery until they die, and million-dollar toilet paper dispensers that limit you to 5 squares. Don’t laugh. Both have happened.)

So while Resilinc, like all new technology platforms, may carry a technology risk, for those of you in the high-tech, medical device, and automotive industries, I believe that it is more likely that it will resonate with your supply chain.