From my conversation with Roland Seckler of Ypsomed and Paul Grandy of Sphera. Read the full case study →
In McKinsey’s 2025 supply chain risk survey of 100 companies, 95% had visibility into at least their tier one supplier risks. Only 42% could see tier two or beyond.
Roland has the same problem. Ypsomed’s suppliers often have confidential contracts with their own suppliers, so the names and addresses at tier two, three and four stay hidden. “This is the normal situation,“ he says.
So Roland asks first. Where asking doesn’t work, he watches the region instead.
Step 1: Ask your supplier to name its suppliers
Roland’s pitch is business continuity. He tells suppliers he needs to see tier three and four for continuity reasons, with no business reason behind it.
He also makes clear who carries the risk. If a tier three supplier fails, the customer blames Ypsomed. “If they fail, we fail,” he says.
Ypsomed talks to its suppliers about this week by week and month by month. Roland says not all of them agree, but some give Ypsomed the addresses of their own suppliers.
If they share: add those sites to your monitoring, so they get watched like your direct suppliers. Ypsomed loads them into Sphera.
If they don’t: go to step 2.
Step 2: Watch the region instead
Roland has been studying AI himself. He calls himself “one of the oldest AI students in Switzerland.” He and Ypsomed’s AI community of practice built an agent for what he calls the “dark box” of tier three, four and five.
The agent knows where Ypsomed’s suppliers are, by city, country and region. When the media reports an incident somewhere, the agent checks which raw materials come out of that region. It then alerts the team, even when the plants that use those materials are far away.
Roland's example is the conflict in the Middle East. Raw materials from the region go into resin made in Europe or North America. So the agent tells the team to check whether that resin supply could be hit.
Roland says Ypsomed may not have all the correct addresses for those suppliers, but the agent still flags anything that happens in their region. He plans to work on it with Sphera next, so the agent’s warnings feed into the software Ypsomed already uses.
Before you apply this
The agent only works if you know which regions your key raw materials come from. Start with the few materials your top products can’t do without.
Mapping the sites is also only the first level. In ‘Why knowing your tier 2 suppliers isn’t enough,’ Paul Grandy of Sphera explains why you also need to know what flows between them.
My notes
I’d borrow Roland’s pitch word for word. Asking for tier two addresses “for business continuity” gives a supplier a reason to say yes that has nothing to do with price.
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