Challenge

The F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) requested assistance in understanding their supply chain’s breadth and depth. The JPO understood key suppliers well but had limited visibility into sub-tier suppliers that provide critical components supporting higher assemblies. The Agency also wanted to identify threats to production, sustainment, operations, and threat actors attempting to insert themselves into susceptible US national security supply chains.

Solution

Guidehouse’s Cybersecurity Solutions Team, Open-Source Solutions Group, and our Defense Segment applied a scalable and repeatable approach, using government and commercial best practices to help illuminate and map this client’s supply chains. The team:

• Aggregated government furnished information (GFI) and open-source data to develop a configuration file and hierarchal mapping of suppliers
• Collaborated with the JPO to develop a customized risk rating process to focus on areas of concern
• Conducted open source, commercial due diligence
• Assessed the strategic impact of suppliers and vendors
• Provided mitigation and remediation recommendations
• Implemented continuous monitoring for critical and sensitive components and entities

Impact

• This supply chain illumination and analysis project resulted in a comprehensive knowledge of global supply chain components including over 6,000 vendors and 150,000 parts. The client acquired an in-depth understanding of the risks presented by key components and organizations that could impact overall program cost, schedule, and performance.
• Guidehouse consultants helped the agency build an infrastructure to effectively manage, analyze, and visualize configuration and supplier data.
• Using automation and machine learning applications, the client has new ways to visualize supplier data, making the information actionable, and providing real value within the program office.

The supply chain illumination improved visibility into the supply chain and identified suppliers that could impact production cost, schedule, and performance. This data can also be used to evaluate data rights assertions and inform multi-year contract strategy.

Learn more about Guidehouse’s supply chain risk management solutions.

Case Study Contributors: Jason Dury, Alex Henry, Jim Harry