NTELX Intern, Ben Plotnick, Featured

Ben Plotnick, a Tufts senior, was featured on the Tuft Career Center Blog. Read about his experience at NTLEX here: Internship Highlight: NTELX – Career Center | Tufts University

Securing Our Supply Chains Requires 'Big Picture' Thinking - The Hill

By Robert Rosenberg - The Hill - October 21, 2020

In late September, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on China’s largest chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), due to the risk of diversion to military end-uses, hampering the company’s ability to acquire U.S. manufacturing equipment and software vital to its operations.

The measures followed recent restrictions on Huawei, marking yet another escalation in U.S.-China relations but also highlighting their economic interdependencies in a critical sector — thus further fueling debates of a destined “decoupling” and the need for self-sufficiency.

There is an undoubted trend towards returning great power competition. Although a full economic schism is unlikely due to the sheer cost and instability it would create in the international system, global supply chains are becoming the new arenas for both sides to influence the technological and economic landscapes of the shifting global paradigm.

To remain competitive — while maintaining an eye towards both economic needs and national security — the U.S. must undertake a concerted effort to address its supply chain vulnerabilities and dependencies in critical areas. These include the sourcing of goods, but also their flow through complex international trade systems. Here are five recommendations for the U.S. to accomplish these goals:

Risk-based prioritization: The U.S. needs to understand the challenges it faces. Almost all industries are at risk of supply chain disruption. However, global trade dynamics make it infeasible for the U.S. to repatriate every production process, nor should it. While areas of interest have been identified to prioritize certain materials, a dynamic risk assessment-based approach to continuously evaluate and re-prioritize which critical supply chains to focus on — without loss of economic efficiency with mitigating their aggregated risk — is critical to resolve the current issues and protect against future vulnerabilities.

The level of essentialness, concentrations of production, ownership (in terms of organizations and locations), and logistical concentrations should be core to this analysis. Each interlocking layer builds on a broader picture of the risks associated with each critical supply chain. Moreover, any assessment must be recurring due to the dynamic nature of supply chains and evolving technologies and needs.

As the U.S. transitions its capacity, strategic stockpiles for critical goods and materials are essential to providing short term cushions against future shocks — whether from a global pandemic or escalating geopolitical tensions.

Targeted investment and R&D: In the 1980s, the U.S. launched SEMATECH to revamp its semiconductor industry, successfully regaining its competitive edge against Japan. Developing similar programs for identified critical industries and increasing investment in advanced manufacturing can help the U.S. maintain a technological and competitive edge. Existing programs, such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) use of the DOD’s Defense Production Act, provide ready-made tools to begin these efforts.

Leveraging the tax code: After identifying critical supply chains, the U.S. can begin strategically delegating its resources to alleviate risks. Tax incentives for Puerto Rico made it a leading center of pharmaceutical manufacturing until their repeal dispersed capacity across the globe — mostly to China and India. Using targeted tax programs, as well as taking advantage of programs such as Opportunity Zones, can encourage domestic capacity in key industries while directing resources to underserved areas and helping revitalize former industrial-based communities.

International supply chain coalition: Australia, India, and Japan are undergoing talks to form a Supply Chain Resilience Initiative in response to growing Chinese economic and military antagonism. The EU also recently launched a Raw Materials Alliance to diversify its access to critical raw materials away from its dependency on China, while the U.S. and Australia formalized a bilateral partnership to create alternatives to Chinese dominance of essential rare earth elements.

The U.S. can build on these international initiatives to distribute the costs and risks of rebalancing its supply chains, benefit from the comparative advantages of close partners, and increase mutual economic security. Joining with like-minded countries and coordinating investment can also provide a counterbalance to China’s attempts to further distort and reorient the international trade system through Belt-Road and other programs.

WTO reform: U.S. leadership in multilateral organizations will be critical. The WTO is the only international organization shaping and enforcing global trade rules. China has long taken advantage of its benefits without adhering to its principles. The U.S. should continue to push for organizational reform. It can also strengthen its diplomatic backing for parallel U.S.-EU-Japan efforts to “pluralize” rules that address abuses by China and others.

The U.S. should move quickly to address urgent near-term concerns.

However, for most vulnerabilities, the U.S. will need a concerted, long-term approach in its investment decisions to take a strategic outlook that involves both domestic and international tools and partnerships to rebalance and diversify its supply chains.

If the U.S. is to address its pressing supply chain vulnerabilities, it must use the full array of domestic and international policy tools at its disposal.

Rob Rosenberg is president and CEO of NTELX, Inc. and a nonresident fellow at The Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research center located in Washington, D.C.

Great Power Competition and Global Supply Chains – The Hill

By Robert Rosenberg - The Hill - August 19, 2020

In his mid-July speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called for an end to “the old paradigm of blind engagement” characterizing U.S. China policy for the last five decades. Pompeo’s speech reflected the increasingly combative language between the U.S. and China, fanning fears of a new Cold War. Given the interconnectedness of the two economies, it is clear that such a competition would look quite different from its 20th century counterpart. However, as tensions rise, more facets of the international system meant to bind the world together are likely to become new arenas for great power competition.

Among the most consequential of these new battlegrounds are the supply chains that underpin the world economy. These complex and globe-spanning networks spread the production of goods across numerous countries, including many that are critical to U.S. national security. But what does great power competition in supply chains mean, and how can the U.S. compete?

Decades of globalization rewarded greater specialization amongst countries, eliminating redundancies and leading to more concentrated production. Streamlined supply chains allowed companies to maximize productivity. However, the hyper-efficiency of global supply chains and a greater reliance on sole-source manufacturing also undermined their resilience, leaving them highly vulnerable to disruption.

These economic developments greatly benefited China. The pursuit of cheap labor and access to its market allowed China to gain market control over wide-ranging industries. Yet, beyond these market forces, China has also used development and economic policy, such as Made in China 2025, to entrench these shifts and achieve dominance in industries seen as critical to its economic and national security — often at the expense of western firms. Programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative further aim to secure access to new markets and global influence.

While the U.S. has slowly reoriented its geopolitical outlook and revived its concern of great power competition, China has long viewed the U.S. as a strategic rival.

China’s successes — especially in pharmaceutical production and rare earth element processing — have left the U.S. highly dependent and vulnerable to disruptions in these supply chains. As the pandemic has shown, the shift of PPE, ventilator, and pharmaceutical production to China has left the U.S. unable to quickly ramp up production in response to hospital shortages of these critical materials. Similarly, many of our advanced defense and technology systems remain completely dependent on rare earth element imports from China.

Many have used this moment to call for America to bring production home to protect us from future disruptions. Others have declared this as the catalyst for decoupling U.S. supply chains from China. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden released a campaign document outlining his plan to onshore key areas of production with massive government contracts, while President Trump has long threatened and used economic policy to pressure companies.

Despite this rhetoric, powerful economic forces, entrenched relationships, and concentrated manufacturing and skill bases make basic trade relations difficult to shift. Interconnected supply chains further serve as a shared infrastructure that promotes stability based on common economic interests. They have also provided tremendous growth for the global economy and have helped lift millions out of poverty. Benefits that we should not undo.

Blind protectionist policies cannot bring home every American factory, nor can they secure our supply chains against renewed great power competition. However, the U.S. can use its resources to encourage more reliability, diversity, and resilience in the supply chains critical to our national security. This will ensure that America does not face disruptions to these strategic goods in the future, whether from a global pandemic or escalating geopolitical tensions.

To achieve this, the U.S. must take action to address near term vulnerabilities. However, it must also use a concerted, long-term approach in its investment decisions to take a strategic outlook that involves both domestic and international partners to rebalance and diversify our supply chains. To prioritize resources, a risk analysis approach to America’s supply chains can help inform policymakers in these decisions.

National security threats have spurred U.S. agencies to overhaul global trade risk management practices before. Following 9/11, border agencies increased cooperation with international partners and adjusted their assessment of supply chains based on the risk of terrorism. To prepare for and mitigate the supply chain vulnerabilities that could emerge from great power competition, the U.S. must again adjust its assessments of supply chains for this new global trade paradigm.

Rob Rosenberg is president and CEO of NTELX, Inc. and a nonresident fellow at The Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research center located in Washington, D.C.

NTELX Joins the Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium (SCRM)

Tysons, VA, July 8, 2020

NTELX, a leading provider of strategic supply chain risk management is proud to join the Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium (SCRM). SCRM is a group of 27 companies with expertise in identifying, assessing, mitigating, and managing supply chain risks. SCRM includes a broad range of organizations in consulting, technology and academia all of whom specialize in different aspects of the Global Trade, Supply Chain and Logistics Risk Management field.

“NTELX is excited to participate in a network of organizations comprised of many leaders in the Supply Chain Risk Management field,” said Rob Rosenberg, CEO of NTELX. “NTELX will be able to further extend its capabilities and expertise to its customer base through leveraging the talent in the SCRM Consortium.”

“NTELX’s focus on SCRM issues especially from a security and public sector perspective will bring additional depth and a new dimension to our portfolio of SCRM member organizations,” said Greg Schlegel, the Founder of the SCRM Consortium.

About NTELX: NTELX is dedicated to solving the most challenging problems of global trade, supply chains, and logistics. Since 9/11, we have been at the forefront of GTSL consulting, strategy, and operational solutions NTELX has developed and implemented robust risk analysis capabilities for international supply chains and associated logistics enterprises around the world, while optimizing for economic growth and efficiency. By understanding supply chains at the data, process, and operational levels, NTELX delivers insights, robust analytical capabilities, and adaptive risk management approaches. For additional information, www.ntelx.com

About SCRM: The SCRM Consortium is a virtual collaboration designed to meet the needs of organizations at all stages of SCRM maturity. For additional information, https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4874779/

We Need To Anticipate Future Supply Chain Disruptions – The Hill

By Robert Rosenberg - The Hill - April 28, 2020

As the devastating effects of the novel coronavirus continue to spread across the country, items such as ventilators and PPEs, like the N95 mask, have become household names because of the public awareness of their extreme shortage. The country is scrambling to figure out how to get our healthcare system these necessities, which in non-crisis times would be sufficient due to the relatively steady, uninterrupted supply chain.

In a time of crisis, though, our reliance on supply chains for goods crucial to getting through the crisis becomes fully apparent. And while some goods, such as face masks and toilet paper, make the news for their scarcity or the ensuing “one item per customer” grocery store limits, less known at-risk goods often fly under the public’s radar.

In order to avoid new and additional critical shortages, the question we need to be asking is: Are we identifying other critical items that might become scarce in the next month, the next 90 days, the next 6 months — and are we planning for their impending shortage, too?

The country is quickly learning how hard it is to rapidly manufacture, procure, and distribute scarce products caused by large, reactionary changes in demand.

Even an item that seems basic, such as toilet paper, is actually supported by a complex supply chain that is hard to rapidly re-orient. Therefore, we can’t passively assume that items that aren’t in crisis today, will have adequate inventory as the pandemic continues, expands and moves to new hot spots.

A system is needed to forecast where and how the supply chains will continue to be disrupted, anticipate upcoming shortages and formulate a plan of action before the deficit hits.

For example, speaking with doctors on the frontlines, even with sufficient ventilators, without the correct anesthetic and paralytic drugs, patients will not be able to physically tolerate being on the ventilator, which would render the extra ventilators ordered in response to the device shortage practically useless. And while the doctors desperately need N95 masks, they also are starting to run low on basic gowns, and actually need Tyvek-like suits to truly prevent them from being infected.

While messaging to the masses has rallied citizens to slow the surgical mask shortage, we must take a broader look at what shortages are to come, especially for shortages like pharmaceuticals that cannot be easily replicated by the public.

The current administration, the states and our major healthcare providers and suppliers must expeditiously learn from the immediate supply crises. As we are seeing in real time, national supply chains are not designed to automatically react quickly just because there is a crisis at hand.

Supply chains have limited flexibility in the short term, taking time to react to disruptions and changes at any level, let alone at every level.

In order to avoid future critical shortages, we must identify both current and likely shortages and activate the necessary resources. We must gather information from a broad array of sources, both public and private organizations, to project future demand spikes and supply constraints. There must also be consistent communication from leaders at all levels so we, as citizens, can help plan for imminent shortages and come up with creative solutions to produce or procure products before they become scarce.

We must expand our thinking to anticipate the complete array of what shortages are likely to come.

Rob Rosenberg is president and CEO of NTELX, Inc. and a nonresident fellow at The Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research center located in Washington, D.C.

NTELX Names Robert Rosenberg as President and Chief Executive Officer

Asheville, NC, March 16, 2020 – NTELX, a leading provider of services and solutions to the public sector in the global trade and supply chain security space, today announced the appointment of Robert Rosenberg as its President and Chief Executive Officer.

“Rob is an integral founding member of the NTELX team. His visionary leadership in the global trade security space, coupled with his experience in finance and organizational building makes him an ideal leader as this vertical space evolves into a new phase,” said Rob Quartel, a former US Federal Maritime Commissioner and Founder of NTELX.

“Rob understands how to navigate the changing dynamics in the global trade security vertical, to assist our clients with aligning their vision, and develop solutions from realigning their strategic direction to transforming the manner in which they operationalize their activities,” said Paul Wedeking, NTELX, Board member.

“NTELX has an extraordinary history of transformative accomplishments in the global trade, supply chain and logistics space. I am excited to continue NTELX’s legacy in this area to assist our partners and clients tackle big problems during this time of significant change,” said Mr. Rosenberg.

Mr. Rosenberg brings over 25 years of financial and organizational development experience and approximately 20 years of developing and delivering projects in the Global Trade Security, Supply Chain and Logistics Security sector. Mr. Rosenberg has advised US and other agencies around the world. He is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Stimson Center and a member of the Board of Directors of the international, non-profit iMMAP. Prior to joining NTELX, Rob held finance and asset management positions at two wholly owned subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs, Archon Group and Goldman Sachs Realty Japan. Rob graduated from Brown University with a dual major, earning an AB in Political Science and Organizational Behavior and Management.

About NTELX

NTELX was founded in 1999, and is headquartered in Asheville, NC with offices also in the Washington, DC area. The company has two decades of experience transforming public and private sector organizations in the Global Trade Security, Supply Chain and Logistics vertical by automating data-driven decisions, applying systems design thinking and applying risk management and decision management techniques.

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NTELX partners with LMI to Support DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office

Tysons, Va, March 11, 2020 –  LMI today announced the award of a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Strategic Technology Office (STO), to support the LogX research and development (R&D) prototype program. The program focuses on discovering and responding to logistics network disruptions. DARPA’s LogX R&D program creates and demonstrates a new paradigm for logistics information awareness across the global logistics enterprise, enabling responsive and resilient operations. LMI has partnered with NTELX, the Florida Institute of Technology, Data Machines Corp., and Cougaar Software Inc. to develop and execute a test and evaluation (T&E) framework for the program. 

As part of the program, risks of data disruptions to the global supply chain will be examined to uncover technologies that can find, prevent, mitigate, and recover from these disruptions. The program solicits technologies in two areas: mission-centered applications with context-centric situational awareness and foresight and cloud-based microservices for dynamic knowledge extraction, state estimation, and causal modeling.

LMI will lead the T&E team in defining, replicating, and exploring logistics information challenges to evaluate the prototypes’ success in understanding dynamic logistics networks. When creating the T&E framework, the team will develop the experimental data environment, create and integrate scenarios, and evaluate vendor technologies alongside DARPA STO.

In today’s rapidly changing world, LMI’s next-generation strategy integrates our core logistics domain experience with advanced analytics.

“We are excited to support the DARPA LogX program as it represents a key element of LMI’s next-generation logistics strategy, powered by advanced analytics. The research platform LogX, enabled by our holistic approach to logistics (HALO), addresses some of our nation’s most complex and urgent logistics priorities,” said Pete Pflugrath, vice president of LMI’s logistics service line.

Comprehensive, real-time situational awareness, future state prediction, and the resilience of the Department of Defense (DoD) global logistics enterprise are fundamental to mission success and survivability. This project will bring DoD closer to effectively realizing the benefits of software-defined networks, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, secure boundaryless collaboration, and smart data encryption. DARPA’s LogX R&D prototype program lays the groundwork for these emerging technologies and LMI’s T&E team will facilitate its success.

“The award of this DARPA LogX R&D program will enable us to continue delivering excellent service to our clients through unparalleled expertise in our advanced analytics and logistics service lines. We are committed to supporting our clients by offering the most forward-thinking solutions to their largest challenges,” said Robert Lech, vice president of LMI’s defense market.

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