In today’s global market, it isn’t rare for a company to have myriad supply chains set up around the world. While working with international suppliers can be very advantageous, it can also carry great risk for the unprepared.
Adverse events such as natural disasters, cyber attacks, political upheaval, and violent conflict among others can limit the productivity and output of international suppliers. As a result, a company’s ability to operate may be compromised if not outright jeopardized. As always with risk management, information and time are critical: the earlier a company can be alerted about or predict upcoming adverse events, the better positioned it is to prepare a successful risk management strategy.
Entity Extraction for Supply Chain Risk Management
Companies can identify, anticipate, and monitor adverse events impacting their supply chains by analyzing news sources and social media. However, it is often an enormous challenge to analyze these sources of information because of the overwhelming volumes of unstructured data they produce.
According to the International Data Corporation, new data is generated at a rate of up to 1.7 MB per person, per second. Still, companies can use news and social media data to their advantage thanks to Entity Extraction software. Entity Extraction software can find the relevant information buried within these large amounts of unstructured data, thus providing actionable insights for risk management.
What to Look for in Entity Extraction Software
For Entity Extraction software to be truly useful for risk mitigation, it is important that the software be able to:
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- Identify named entities like the names of people, organizations, places, time expressions, and monetary amounts.
- Identify links like the locations of companies, the relationships between companies, and the affiliations of people.
- Identify a large set of relevant events such as political changes, crime, cyber security incidents, conflicts, and natural disasters.
- Perform geotagging, that is, disambiguate and assign coordinates to the extracted places. Once place names are geotagged, the extracted information, including events, can be viewed on a map.
- Be accurate as measured by standard metrics: recall (false negatives or missed information) and precision (false positives or extraneous extraction).
- Be fast to support real-time monitoring.
- Be able to process data in multiple languages.
When your company extends overseas, it’s critical to be able to identify potential threats and adverse events. For this reason, it’s essential to use Entity Extraction software that goes beyond the usual standard. For more information on NetOwl’s Entity Extraction software, contact NetOwl today.
