A predictive analytics and big data tool that Lockheed Martin [LMT] has been developing and using for the past six years with a focus on intelligence and security is being turned toward additional uses such as supply chain risk management and identifying potential counterfeit parts suppliers, according to company officials.
Lockheed Martin has been applying LM Wisdom internally for a few years to analyze supply chain risks across its enterprise but as the capabilities of the tool were built out its customers took notice and demand grew from there beginning about 18 months ago, Mike Baylor, the company’s program manager for LM Wisdom, told Defense Daily in a recent interview at the company’s offices in Herndon, Va.
Supply chains are a “weak link for a lot of organizations” and a “big concern of a lot of our government and commercial customers,” Baylor said. “We feel there is no one else in the marketplace right now that offers our services. So we’re a market leader in that category and it’s real exciting for us.”
One of Lockheed Martin’s customers for LM Wisdom is a Fortune 500 company that is using the tool across its enterprise to do investigative analysis by its legal team, to examine economic, social and political trends and stability for supply chain risk globally, and to support brand and reputational management, Baylor said.
LM Wisdom is the company’s commercial brand for its various tools and services in the predictive analytics space that gather information online through social media, web sites, blogs and other forums. LM Wisdom OS is a tool that Lockheed Martin licenses to customers as part of their own security efforts and the company also offers analyst services where its experts use their tradecraft in combination with the analytics tool to meet customer needs.
“The real secret sauce here is having the tradecraft to do something with the tool,” Jason O’Connor, vice president of Analysis and Mission Solutions at Lockheed Martin, said in the interview. “We can build the tool, we can update algorithms to analyze a broad array of topics; they all provide speed and scale for analysts.”
Baylor said that “We get a lot of customers that try to venture out on their own from a cold start just buying our technology and they struggle significantly and once they see the actionable results we get and how flexible we are then they say, ‘let’s talk about a partnership.’ That’s where we find a lot of our growth these days.”
Lockheed Martin has also developed its predictive analytics and big data tools for government customers under the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) brand. These tools include iCAST, iTrace, and iSent, which is essentially LM Wisdom for the government side.
O’Connor said that when LM Wisdom was being developed, the company “built it as a framework that could accept algorithms for any domain we could think of.” Baylor said “We have built a sensor for the Internet to collect information and data. It can be turned on almost any mission topic [and] as long as there is a conversation or information online about that topic we will find it.”
Another area that Lockheed Martin has been using LM Wisdom for internally is to assess suppliers for counterfeit risks. The company is now rolling this capability out for commercial sales, Baylor said.
One demand driver here is a Federal Acquisition Regulation guideline requiring defense contractors to have a counterfeit mitigation strategy, Baylor said. The company wants to offer LM Wisdom to aerospace and defense companies to meet that requirement, he said.
As part of its own counterfeit supply mitigation efforts, Lockheed Martin has been able to get data that is 30 to 40 years old to plug it into LM Wisdom and the models are between 80 to 90 percent accurate in terms of identifying “likely counterfeit suppliers,” Baylor said. This is “not saying you should use suppliers or not but it indicates [who] may be risky.”
Since last fall Lockheed Martin has also been working with the Defense Logistics Agency on a pilot to use its analytics tools for the purposes of supply chain management services, in particular supplier discovery. The discussion and architecture of the pilot was seeded by the Ebola crisis in West Africa, although the plan is to scale the tool globally, Baylor said.
The idea is to help Defense Department forces be able to source basic supplies locally or regionally if it is cheaper. However, in austere environments it is challenging to know “who is sourcing what” so Lockheed Martin is using LM Wisdom and other data sources to allow users to type in their commodity needs and the tool will generate a list of suppliers with geo-location, information about each company, previous contracts with the U.S. government, volumes, and more, Baylor said.
Using LM Wisdom and the company’s analysts, Lockheed Martin can then do a “deep dive on those companies” and do a risk assessment of each and provide that to users in-country within one to two days, Baylor said.
For its LM Wisdom Analyst Services offered to commercial customers, the company brings to bear its iCAST and iTRACE tools. These tools, which aren’t available yet for license to commercial customers, are used to monitor global events.
In the case of iCAST, the tool forecasts instability in 167 countries, while iTRACE automatically monitors political activity globally by ingesting and processing news stories. Baylor said that iCAST makes use of iTRACE data to “statistically model what’s happened in the trending over the last several years and it will approximate what’s going to happen in the future for specific events of interest.” The tool’s predictive capabilities work better if instability occurred in the past in a specific country, with accuracy levels in the 80 to 90 percent range.
“The models self-learn based on what’s happened and are getting smarter and smarter over time,” Baylor said.
This isn’t “soothsaying,” O’Connor said. “It’s mathematically and statistically driven results that we’re looking for.” He added that “Any customer with international concerns is going to benefit from this.”
Baylor said that as the availability of information explodes with developments such as the Internet of Things, more predictive and data analytics will continue to be added to the tool suite, noting that “We’re in the early innings of what this will evolve to be.”