Imagine that three natural disasters hit your global supply chain within three years. For Keysight Technologies, this isn’t a hypothetical scenario. Between 2015 and 2016, earthquakes in Japan and explosions at a container storage station in China affected parts of the company's supply chain. Then in 2017, the Tubbs wildfire burned down two structures at the company’s headquarters and damaged others. What could have been a series of business fiascos was not. The company had continuity and disaster recovery plans in place, and supply chain employees routinely ran drills to prepare for potential issues. Despite this, the wildfires were a supply chain manager’s nightmare. A factory that was the sole source of one of Keysight Technologies’ products had been damaged in the blaze. Failure to quickly restore operations would mean unhappy customers and lost revenues.
"Plans are great. Simulations help. Execution is important. But as Mike Tyson once said, 'Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.'”
But the worst possible outcome never happened. Within a week, Keysight Technologies’ had leveraged Kinaxis® RapidResponse® capabilities to monitor their supply chain and meet customer commitments. 
Learn how Jason Wisler (Technology Supply Chain Manager), Ethan Hunt (NPI Supply Chain Engineering Manager) and Hock Seng Oh (Supply Chain Governance Manager):
- Diverted raw materials to other sites
- Ran fast-paced simulations to determine the impacts to 11,000 components and more than 600,000 unique items across ten sites
- Avoided a single customer order cancellation using a cross-function priority escalation process
After you’ve heard their story, check out the other video in our Big Ideas in Supply Chain series, Atul Tandon: A Practical Approach to the Digital Supply Chain. Stay tuned for more! Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get alerts when new videos are uploaded.
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