New online insight hub revealed to increase intelligence resources for supply chain decision makers

Following their acquisition by Thomson Reuters in October 2019, Eye for Transport (eft), the team behind the world’s leading Supply Chain Summit, are making their incredible insights and analysis collections available for free in a new industry intelligence hub

Get the insights at https://events.eft.com/3pl/content-library.php#

The acquisition combines Reuters’ globally trusted news brand, scale and editorial excellence with eft’s deep expertise in highly specialized events and content production for key decision makers right across the supply chain industry.

To understand how the newly launched Insight Hub fits into their long-term vision for the supply chain industry, eft sat down with one of the key Project Directors overseeing both the new content platform and Supply Chain Europe event, Paddy Le Count to find out more.

What role does eft play in the supply chain market and what business intelligence does it provide?

In short, eft provides business insights and analysis to the whole supply chain industry. Though we're most known for doing that through our events, we also produce a huge volume of business intelligence in conjunction with these events to engage our global audience in the run up to every conference.

Historically, we’ve done this through free to download whitepapers and reports but have increasingly looked to webinars where key decision makers and influential stakeholders can share best practice in their industry directly with the market between events as well.  

How does the eft Insight Hub create new value for supply chain professionals on top of the services and events eft already provides?

As mentioned earlier, we’d traditionally release major content and webinars in advance of our events, but these would only be marketed for a short time. The Insight Hub doesn’t just give us an opportunity, for the first time, to house all this industry leading content in one place, it also gives us the scope, resources and platform to create, commission and curate a far broader collection of business-critical intelligence than ever before.

As with our events, the Insight Hub will serve the full value chain of job roles and disciplines contained within the supply chain industry. Wherever you are involved in the supply chain ecosystem; as a manufacturing, retailer, logistics or tech solution provider, we can now house a far greater library of content than has previously been possible.

We’re lucky to have a unique legacy of creating platforms that bring the supply chain industry’s biggest and most influential names together to share their expertise, so it’s exciting to be able to offer this digitally through the hub in addition to our leading conferences and exhibitions.

That’s why we hope this Insight Hub will become a valuable tool used by supply chain professionals globally to discover the latest trends before they happen, work with our network of experts to uncover solutions before they’re needed and unlock the full potential of their business units no matter which market they operate in.

In turn, we also hope to act as a catalyst for supply chain businesses and professionals looking to make the leap into sharing insights of their own; whether they can share new technology use cases, perspectives on trends, valuable data sets or industry initiatives from; sourcing and procurement practices to last mile delivery, – you can see that it’s a really wide reaching and exciting project to launch!

Why is eft offering this new service?

It’s clear that insights, data and reliable information are more important to decision making than ever before, and while we have facilitated knowledge exchange chiefly through our conferences in the past, we cannot be ignorant to the fact that conference attendance can’t always be possible for all attendees – the current COVID-19 crisis is perhaps a more extreme example of this than we could have anticipated but helps serve the value of digital knowledge sharing.

Our strengths have always been in unlocking the world’s most influential decision makers and being the vehicle for them to deliver new insights and business critical intelligence to the masses. As a result, it is quite natural for us to be looking for new opportunities to share this treasure trove of insights and increase engagement amongst our audiences while we continue to grow.

As I have said before, we now have the platform to do this, to share industry leading insights and deploy our networks to achieve this. It’s just that now really couldn’t be a better time to launch this platform and ensure that our readers can access critical insights that can help them optimize processes, workflows and systems in what is now a time of increased uncertainty and pressure to produce. 

Does this mean that people are turning away from events?

No not at all, as we all know there's nothing as good as face to face networking. However, we can’t ignore the fact that large gatherings aren’t a priority right now - that’s why we will look to ensure that our network can still access business critical insights in the interim.

Event attendance, whether at events as large as the Supply Chain USA, eft’s flagship event for North America – or our laser focused Logistics CIO Forums will continue to be the destination events for the face-to-face best practice sharing and networking upon which our industry relies to grow, thrive and exceed expectations.

What kind of audience does eft serve and how engaged is its audience to digital content?

All our in-depth analysis pieces, reports and articles are research focused and look to understand what senior level executives in the supply chain industry need to know about right now to make better informed decisions.

Our current network stands at around 70,000 global supply chain professionals, but we can magnify that reach to 400,000+ once we consider our ability to leverage multiple mainstream and niche industry channels to get all our content out and visible to the supply chain industry as a whole.

We’ve always looked to develop close relationships and partnerships with the principal associations, magazines and trade publications that serve each sub-market of the supply chain industry no matter if we’re talking about global shipping lanes, warehouse robotics or the growth of eCommerce.

It’s through leveraging these relationships that we’re able to penetrate our insights far deeper into companies and professional networks than has previously been possible in the supply chain market.

Add to this the fact that we’re very digitally apt, possess an engaged social media following and have been very successful at engaging people that are hungry to learn, it’s a good time to be launching as platform such as our new Insights Hub.

What do people need to do to access the hub? What does it cost?

All you have to do is click here and find the Insight Hub where all our content is hosted for free – it really is that simple!

What are some of the main trends that we are seeing having an impact across the supply chain industry?

Well, or course these are uncertain times for the supply chain industry and all the players within. Some segments of the market have slowed, others are booming. E-commerce business, F&B and domestic trucking are up, but passenger airlines are grounded, ports are snarled up and shipping routes are being curtailed at short notice, so buyers are having an extra hard look at how they transport goods.

There is significant uncertainty on both the supply and the demand side, with both constantly shifting in rapid time. Supply is at risk as factories have been forced to shut down from quarantine measures, causing others further downstream to seize up as components are no longer available. Even when they are restarted, often transportation systems are not ready to support them. On the demand side, consumer requirements are changing rapidly and purchasing orders are shifting at a dramatic rate.

Achieving visibility is so key as the current interconnectedness of the supply chain runs so deep, meaning that disruption of one node will have significant external effect. Ultimately, the question is: Can the logistics infrastructure hold up? Concern is compounded by the ‘Just-in-Time’ supply chain processes that the supply chain relies upon. Just-In-Time relates to a supply chain which optimizes for efficiency but doesn’t bake in the redundancy or risk tolerance to absorb significant disruption.

In this light, words such as supply chain risk management, sustainability, collaboration, resilience, agility and visibility have been used consistently over recent times – and now more than ever.

Are there any examples of content currently available through the Insight Hub or soon to be available that kind of touch on these trends?

Absolutely! There is so much content on our Insight Hub already. A great place to start would be our virtual roundtable discussions that address several the trends I mentioned before. Two spring to mind. Firstly, The Impact of Increasing eCommerce and Delivering Customer Expectations which explores the implications the current spike in eCommerce will have on business and their supply chain and logistical practices as well as the wider environmental sustainability issues that come with this. Coupled with the crucial importance of data management and customer interaction and there a quite a few plates that need to be kept spinning.

In addition, you can’t really understand the full picture of supply chain risk without listening to a webinar we ran entitled: COVID-19: Implications on Inventory Planning, Sourcing and Procurement. The impact on supply chains is huge and the pressures the virus has placed on processes throughout the chain is creating massive headaches for executives who are frantically trying to restructure plans with out of date demand data, halted supply lines and numerous projections that aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

There are also a great selection of reports and whitepapers that have been created addressing issues ranging for last mile operations to supply chain technology advancements – these are great if you want to dig into some surveys and data we have compiled for you and really understand what the industry is saying. All of these are available for users to access, completely free and with much more to follow.

What if I wanted to create content with eft for its audience, what should I do?

The best and simplest thing to do is to reach out to our team which is at our email content@eft.com  and let us know what you're thinking. We can then work with you to advise which products would be the best fit for getting your message and insights out into the supply chain community.

We do the hard work and get your insights and technical knowhow in front of the professionals and decision makers that you need to be successful, and it all starts with just an email to the address above.

To achieve this, we have to be very dynamic in terms of the products that we deliver. It might be that a report is the best option, or a webinar but whether we decide to commission or collaborate on a whitepaper, interview, podcast, video or anything else. You name it, if the content itself is high quality we will go the extra mile to ensure that your message gets through to the people that matter most.

What kind of return on investment will I see on working with eft? What kinds of leads have been generated before?

The return on investment really depends on what you’re looking for, we take a very qualitative over quantitative approach.

This means if success for you is getting your content in front of fifty spot-on people then we’ll target them directly and use these lead generation metrics to measure success.

Conversely, if you’re looking for as much broad exposure as possible to niche markets, we’ll work with all our best-fit partners to see that your content is front and centre in their minds.

The eft Supply Chain Insight Hub is live, free and available at to access here right now

Please contact content@eft.com if you have any questions.

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