 Good morning. All right, day two. So Pete Flores, I'm the executive assistant commissioner for office of field operations Very honored to be here today and be able to kick off day two had an opportunity to see the kickoff at day one been able to hear some of the Comments on the panels and the number of participants online. So a lot of good conversation, right? A lot of good activity and Collaboration right which is what we're hoping for and why we're bringing people together For this event. So I'd like to thank the office of trade For initiating this event right and all the employees behind the scenes that really went to make this happen In order to have us all here to really start to talk about forced labor what that means the collaboration What's out there right? How do we come together to in order to put our best foot forward our best efforts forward on how we Prevent right this heinous crime On what we see out there from a forced labor perspective Also like to thank all of you that are here either in person or virtually For being here taking the time out of your schedules and really have hold this conversation and participate either Virtually or in person on what we're doing over the next couple days here. I think coming together for us the ability to come together for the song this important event is Important and as we think about the innovative ways, right on how we can combat the forced labor issue for us Right our ability to share information is the way we're going to be able to do this as we talk about partnership and stopping forced labor into our supply chains as Executive assistant direct assistant commissioner for OFO many of you aware I have the responsibility of board security at our 20 or 328 ports across the country so one of our responsibilities in Really legitimate trade and travel right from a national security perspective what trade and travel looks like and Facilitating that through our ports of entry is also combating forced labor Goods and articles coming through our ports of entry That have been made with forced labor so as we Talk about what ports of entry are and we talk about numbers and really what that is right Our ports of entry are busy busy locations across the country. We start talking scope and volume of what we do every day All right, our ports of entry are processing over a million travelers a day coming in to the country every single day We are processing over 90,000 rail sea truck Coming across our borders or into our seaports every single day We are processing over 10,000 shipments of goods and approvals for entries every single day So there's quite a bit of volume coming at us every every day at our ports of entry So as we shift through that and really make assessments on what we want to do right forced labor being a priority for us Is is going to require the partnership and the collaboration that we have established and will continue to establish going forward for us, but I think For slavery as we talked knowingly or unknowingly we talked about shipments of forced labor coming through our ports of entry, right? That we know goes to financing transnational criminal organization or entities That are abusing workers and threatening Americans economic security So field operations and what we do every single day we deploy Dynamic risk-based approach on what we want to see and what we want to look at based on high-risk goods Using current information and data that we have in our systems are being shared with us We identify and target Information related to a variety of threat streams pertaining to forced labor Our frontline personnel every day are reviewing manifests and entry information for specific shipments looking for red flags or indicators Of which one of them is a linkage to violate of shipments that we've seen in the past connecting a shipment to a previously Known or violated shipment with forced labor for us is a very proactive Avenue and how we pursue determining the legitimacy of the cargo or the shipment that we have in front of us We also receive a lot of information from industry itself We get feedback from the trade About manufacturers and raw materials and what we're dealing with and I think that partnership in itself Cannot be overstated the value that it brings to the process of Enforcement compliance on what the next steps are for us at our ports of entry So we use that all all that information and making determinations about whether or not the item that we have in front of us Right is likely to be from the Xinjiang region Once we determine that a shipment is subject to the Uyghur Forest Labor Protection Act Then the onus as you're all aware is it is on the importer to overcome the presumption of forced labor So far in FY 23 we have we have targeted over 1,700 shipments that fall into that category Not really from the overall scheme of things is right as we talk about the number of shipments coming in the number of containers Coming in the number of truck and rail shipments coming in There's really a small percentage of the total overall volume that we are looking at when we think about 1,700 shipments And the volume that we're dealing with at our ports of entry every day It is a small percentage Of what we're dealing with today. I Think another reason for us as I talk about partnership and collaboration another Reason for our success here is our CTPAT program All right, so CTPAT which is founded in what strong public private partnership is for us has Grown tremendously over the last 20 years for us We now have close to 11,000 dedicated program partners and The results of the work can be seen through the continued growth of the program as well as lessons learned lessons learned over the years With the increased scrutiny of Goods with forced labor. We are excited right about the way forward and how our partners have come together To address forced labor in our supply chain Just to give you a brief overview overview of CTPAT In FY 22 we signed two new mutual Recognition agreements to bring our total to 16 MRAs and we signed two joint working plans with Guatemala and Columbia Which obviously can turn into MRAs for us over the last year CTPAT went back to in-person validations and were able to validate 456 Validations in Canada and Mexico this year with CTPAT we plan to get back to pre-covid era what we were doing with in-person Validations while continuing to continuing to use the validation right the virtual validation of where required Some of CTPAT's best accomplishments recently have come out of strengthening our requirements We have been bringing additional awareness to our partners asking them to monitor their supply chains for forced labor The mission and effort to combat forced labor has been so great that we have worked to provide Additional standards for both the minimum security criteria for CTPAT Security and have made it an integral part of CTPAT's trade compliance program The criteria sets a mark To eliminate participating companies using forced labor's Through collaboration and other government partner agencies and the commercial customs operation advisory committee CTPAT was able to Evaluate multiple forced labor benefit recommendations I think the bottom line for us Over the now and as we continue forward is that we have to do everything we can to safeguard American businesses from unfair Competition while protecting vulnerable people right from inhumane working and living conditions The only way we can do this is by working together and sharing best practices as my colleague EAC Heismas Said yesterday technology is a critical tool for us on how we combat this effort But can never replace the dual diligence on how we do this every single day Now it's an honor for me to introduce our keynote speakers first. We'll hear from Kit Coughlin the vice president of global Client engagement at Kerron an organization that provides data analytic tools to optimize Core functions of financial crimes and compliance programs Mr. Coughlin works with global corporate corporates and financial institutions on sanctions export control and supply chain risk Prior to Kerron, Mr. Coughlin served as national security positions with the US government Where he specialized in non-proliferation and East Asia security issues Second we'll hear from Dr. Laura Murphy who is a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hamlin University Dr. Murphy's research focuses on trafficking contemporary slavery and forced labor globally She's currently working on multiple research projects Focused on forced labor She is also an author of several books including freedomville the story of the 21st century slavery revolt Without a doubt. We have an exciting agenda Over today and and what we what we had yesterday So I want to thank you again for your participation in your collaborative efforts Look forward to meeting with many of you and continuing the important conversations on forced labor So with that I'll turn it over to mr. Coughlin sir the floor is yours Wonderful to be back up to discuss today a bit of a different topic We were asked to present to industry a bit about real-life examples of what you have LPA Intelligence looks like how do you think about these issues from the perspective of doing due diligence on your supply chain? What are some of the industry best practices? Associated with UF LPA compliance. I think more importantly though to start is not only why this matters from an ethical Ethical perspective we heard that from El Nagar and Nori yesterday, but from an industry perspective Why does this matter? If you look at sanctions regulations over the last several decades The numbers of penalties that you've seen for sanctions violations Pail in comparison to what CBP has been able to accomplish in nearly nine months of UF LPA enforcement from a value of goods detention perspective So for those that may not follow the monthly updates from CBP on the statistics or maybe you haven't seen the new dashboard Highly encourage you to look at that but this is the number that matters So in the back of your mind when you're thinking about due diligence when you're talking to your c-suite about why the UF LPA matters to you as a company to you as a bank to you as a freight forwarder Whatever the case may be is this is the number that matters. We haven't even We haven't even had a law and effect for a year yet And we're almost at a billion dollars worth of goods being detained per the risks outlined in the UF LPA Fortunately for government and now a new challenge for industry is that's just the beginning CBP has a mandate The power and the enforcement authorities to scale enforcement for the UF LPA. They have new resources Congress this is a bipartisan consensus issue in a world and in a city in Washington where bipartisanship is sometimes rare This is a key Priority from a national security and an economic security perspective on both sides of the hill and in the White House right now So we see this when budgets change. This is the new budget New people are coming on board new capabilities are coming on board So if CBP was able to detain eight hundred million dollars worth of goods in the last nine months imagine Where their enforcement capabilities will be as resources grow So what do you actually do about this I Said this yesterday. I'll foot stomp it again today CBP has explicitly provided Guidance time and time again to industry on how to think about this law and how to actually comply with this law If you're in supply chain risk management if you're thinking about compliance and you're sending surveys to your companies and your To your ones your tier twos and you're asking them. Please check this box. Do you use forced labor? Yes or no What do you think they're gonna say? It's going to always be no regardless of whether or not that's actually the truth, right? So we have to shift from an industry perspective Outside of this format where you only think about cascading surveys the guidance explicitly states that these types of surveys These types of audits are no longer sufficient What else? This is all complicated by Emerging and changing regulations But you also have on the other side of the coin suppliers in China that are obfuscating their ties to the region and Xinjiang They're ties to companies that have received labor transfers that have received banned or high-risk raw materials From Xinjiang or produced with forced labor via the other typologies that CBP has outlined So not only do you have the new legislation? Not only do you have new resources coming on bear to? Help enforce this law to the fullest extent possible, but you also now have a Challenging environment through which to actually find an action intelligence that can enable you to detect these risks So let's actually talk about that. I mentioned this yesterday But when we think about forced labor risks and you think about the WROs that have been publicly announced or the UFLPA Entity list there's only 20 or so companies that have been publicly identified by CBP as being representative of these risks But if you if you crack open one of those WROs if you really examine those entities that have been identified by CBP Please read Laura's reporting on this. It's pretty explicit why those parties were targeted with an enforcement action But that's just one small subset of the overall risk category When you're thinking about the UFLPA and you're thinking about the the guidance that CBP has provided to all of us in this room It's explicit. You must demonstrate due diligence You must conduct effective supply chain mapping and you must have supply chain management measures to ensure that No products manufactured in whole or in part with inputs derived from forced labor are brought into this country So what I want to do is actually talk again real briefly about these typologies And then I'm going to walk through some case studies that involve real companies that are involved in these typologies We're going to discuss how you can think about intelligence How you can conduct the due diligence on your own supply chain using the partners in this room using Intelligence that you may have that Karen has whomever has right to identify these typologies But just to make sure that we're all again on the same page for those that may have forgotten from yesterday These typologies these warning signs from force for forced labor came from the government once again CBP has explicitly provided over and over again information to industry on how to detect risk on what types of risk to detect and these are Those risks so things like for example forced labor in prisons companies co-located with prisons Government subsidies the mutual pairing assistance program all of these things are red flags for industry So how do you actually detect it? So let's let's start with the real case study It's always more fun to see this So when you're thinking about mapping your supply chain what I'll do in this instance is start with the risk itself an actual Prison in Xinjiang you can see it for yourself. You could try to find this on Google satellite imagery It's there right so the first thing that you need to do from a diligence perspective If the if the guidance explicitly states that companies co-located with prisons are are subject to a possible detention You probably should know where the prisons are right so first we identify the prison and then we figure out What are those companies that are located at that prison? This is? very common Let me say that again. It is very common for companies Mines and farms to be located at prisons in Xinjiang or internment camps or Re-education centers in Xinjiang. This is not made up CBP didn't make this up. This is real This is how it's actually happening So once you identify those companies that are located at those prisons the names start changing a bit You keep building out these risks and you identify other companies that are owned by front Companies at these prisons pull back that thread a little bit more this guidance is explicit It tells you to look explicitly for these types of red flags. You build that further you identify Cotton companies for example that ultimately are four levels on paper removed from a prison But once you dive into that using an intelligence analytical process You're able to see that these front companies these shell companies that the Chinese are using to Hide and obfuscate this activity. This is real and so from there from a UF LPA perspective What does this mean if you're sourcing products from a company that's got Xinjiang and its title? Think about that. I mean there's there's there's red flags there that you should be aware of But really the risk for the UF LPA goes above and beyond that so you need to understand Where are those other companies in China or in other parties like or other countries like Vietnam? Sourcing their products from companies that are located at these prisons the UF LPA is explicit the guidance is explicit You have to conduct due diligence on those companies in Vietnam to ensure that the products that they are that you're buying from them Do not have inputs derived from forced labor. This is a global problem. The regulation is explicit You can't just think about Xinjiang risk by I'm only buying stuff from Vietnam. Therefore. I'm clean I don't have to worry about the UF LPA. It's not how global supply chains work And so this is a good reminder that from an industry perspective The first step in this process if you're that identified US company on here If you're that identified European retailer on here The first step that you need to do when you're thinking about this risk is Identify who all your tier ones are and then it's a matter of using some of the great partners that are here that CBP is brought together that provide that mapping service for you to identify your tier twos and Then from there you're able to layer on that intelligence to figure out here's where the actual risk lies So over and over and over again a lot of the panelists have discussed There's no silver bullet for UF LPA compliance. You have to conduct your own supply chain mapping You have to understand who's in your supply chain and you have to layer on and understand from an intelligence perspective Where this obfuscation is taking place? So that's case study number one case study number two aluminum Lots of questions I get asked about what commodities are being targeted next And I'm sure Laura's gonna answer some of these questions as well But from our perspective and I won't speak on Laura's perspective But for my perspective anyway, it's pretty obvious if you want to understand where the guidance is going if you want to Understand what are the next commodities that are going to be targeted for the UF LPA from a detention perspective? Look at what goods are being manufactured mined in whole or in part in Xinjiang. It's pretty straightforward One example of that is aluminum. There are massive aluminum supply chain Connections to parties and Xinjiang that represent risk. So here's a real example Xinjiang Join World Xinjiang Join World is a company that represents all sorts of red flags for the UF LPA The first of which is they are affiliated with the so-called mutual pairing assistance program So they've received incentives from the Xinjiang government to establish satellite factories located around the country around the province Where force labor is being utilized the second red flag for this company is that they've been identified as part of the Force labor terminology that CBP has outlined in the Xinjiang supply chain business advisory as well as subsequent UF LPA due diligence Guidance so these are things for example like poverty alleviation educating ethnic minorities on Mandarin These are all red flags per the guidance So when you're thinking about these these types of companies and you're trying to figure out where in your supply chain There's actual risk these are the typologies that you can use to identify that this all comes from government They've been very explicit and very open about this The next piece here is labor transfers. So this company has also been involved with labor transfers So you keep adding these red flags on to these companies, right? So they've received labor transfers They've sent labor ethnic Uighur labors to other factories to work at and then from there I would also note that they're publicly traded So if you're a financial institution and you're thinking about your securities and you're thinking about your risk perspective What happens if you own stock and your vanguard account or in your TSP and it's an emerging markets fund and Xinjiang join world as all of a sudden having all of their goods detained at the border. That's not great for From a financial perspective, right? So think about that think about the obfuscation They have companies that are located in Hong Kong that are moving these these aluminum shipments from all of this boils back down to the risk typologies themselves and then from there you have identified automakers both in the United States Europe as well as other aluminum companies and in third countries, right? So another typology and I know we're running running a little tight here So I'm gonna go through a couple of other ones just to kind of make people think about this from a bit more of a of an interesting perspective One topic that we didn't spend a whole lot of time on yesterday Although Elegar and Nori both briefly mentioned it was the Xinjiang production and construction core if you look at the CBP guidance on What are the red flags Xinjiang production and construction core? affiliates subsidiaries Another flashing red light in your supply chain. So things for example like XPCC affiliates It's very common from our perspective looking at these networks from an intelligence perspective to see parties that are affiliated with XPC XPC co-located or involved in the same supply chain as parties that have already been publicly identified by CBP on the UFLPA Entity list or historically via WROs So here's an example of an XPC subsidiary You have the 8th division in this case. They manufacture all sorts of products that are being sold all over the world They also are part of the supply chain for another company Xinjiang Jengar cotton and linen Co, which is on the UFLPA entity list So by understanding the sources of this risk, you then follow the supply chain companies like Lutai textiles works with hundreds of American and European companies They're sourcing cotton from Xinjiang they're sourcing cotton from another party on the UFLPA entity list, but they're not located in Xinjiang They are located in a separate province And if you are only relying on surveys, you may not know that that party is actually sourcing It's cotton from from Xinjiang and from a party on the UFLPA entity list So another typology that you can see here is once again Just because you're not sourcing products directly from your tier ones in Xinjiang There is risk. That's far more expansive than than just screening the zip codes You have to do that extra level of due diligence to determine if any of the parties located in other provinces and other countries are providing that band or high-risk raw material to you because Again, you don't want an attention and this is knowable. You can do this It is possible to have this intelligence and then from there if you're a Western fashion retailer You've got Xinjiang cotton in your supply chain The next case study that I'll briefly discuss is government subsidies. This is In Xinjiang, it's very common for the Xinjiang production and construction core to provide power to provide electricity subsidized electricity to companies to make to mines for for silica for the polysilicon supply chains very very common for Xinjiang government XBCC subsidiaries to be offered to companies to help offset some of the costs for Manufacturing these products or mining these products In this case government subsidies once again another typology that CBP has provided Explicit guidance on for three years. I should note on how client or how Companies can can think about this intelligence how they can operationalize this intelligence and how they can actually Detect this risk and stop these types of products for mentoring your supply chain So government subsidies in this case from XBCC going to a biotech company who has Onward supply chain connections to parties both in the United States as well as in South Asia So if you're if you've maybe had a detention and you're thinking why did CBP detain this good? Well ask yourself have you done that supply chain mapping? Have you identified the Chenguang biotech groups of the world and your supply chain? Have you identified their tier twos? Have you identified their tier threes and if not and you're asking yourself why did I get a detention? Well, there's probably some sort of risk that's tied back into the government guidance that once again CBP Has been very explicit very open about encouraging industry to look at in order to comply with the law So last slide here. I work with Hundreds of clients at this point on the UFLPA both the largest companies the largest financial institutions as we're all Collectively trying to wrap our minds around how do you think about the rebuttable? Presumption how do you think about the due diligence requirements that are required in the law itself? How do you think about enforcement trends? What's next? I would distill those the guidance that I kind of provide back to clients into four pretty simple bullet points Listen if you've got an attention and you're just now starting to think about how do I comply with the law? You're working you're working backwards you got to do it the other way around you got to be proactive You have to understand where your supply chain is What are the inputs in your supply chain that represent risk because that's the only way to proactively use a risk-based approach? To detecting these types of typologies in your supply chain if you've got an attention I know you've got your hair on fire and you got to work through that But but please please the government has been very explicit on how to provide Use intelligence how to think about supply chain mapping there are all sorts of documents and FAQs that CBP has published Please read them. I find that a lot of people sometimes get busy and they don't read the guidance And then they're confused about why a detention happened This is as open and great as as it gets from a government perspective The intelligence community is never going to provide a full list to CBP of every company that that's subject to these restrictions, right? It's an evolving Supply chain supply chains change every hour of every day and they always will there will never be a List that's published by CBP. That's all encompassing of the risk Typologies that happen here front companies will always pop up shell companies will always pop up there will always be obfuscation So just think about that if you're if you've got an attention work through it But it's time to build a program around detecting this type of risk With that I know I think my time is is limited here But if there are questions, I'm happy to answer them and then I want to make sure Laura. Oh, yes Thank you for those excellent remarks both yesterday and today and for those of you who don't know me I'm Piero Totsi. I'm the staff director of the Congressional Executive Commission on China whose principles Congressman Chris Smith Congressman governs senators Merkley and Ruby over the authors of the reger forced labor prevention act and and just to underscore the bipartisan interest in this issue and The the scrutiny that it will be receiving in this Congress both from the China Commission and also the the select Committee as well, but my question for you Kit is You talked about stock portfolios and the impact that could have on the bottom line there But what about the issue of materiality of disclosures and omissions for the purposes of 1934 act? Should that also be a concern? Omissions should always be a concern from my perspective So we are the the environment with respect to the data that's available is changing Regularly and Laura I'm sure can speak about this But the risk information that we're seeing on on companies starting to to not disclose their Supply chain relationships inside of China that type of information is is taking place already So historically you had a broad set of disclosure requirements for publicly traded companies in China that outline their supply chains There's information that's starting to evolve and dry up as part of that I don't know if that gets to your question, but that information is changing but the disclosures from the US side anyway certainly would be Interesting to see but I am not in a position to make any sort of policy recommendations. Okay. Well, thank you Sir, I'm Tony with Livingston. Thank you interesting comments Are you aware of any situation where maybe an importer has? Timely and proactively used the intelligence That was then successfully used in overcoming the rebuttable presumption standard. I Got that question three or four times a day So the from my perspective as as an intelligence professional If you've identified intelligence that that signifies that there's some sort of risk Per the typologies and warning signs that CBP is publicly announced It's it's probably too little too late to get something released because there's intelligence that suggests that there is forced labor in your And your supply chain so proving a negative in that concept is always from a detention perspective It's it's a little bit of a The carts behind the horse Whereas from what I encourage clients to think about intelligence is you want to use intelligence to identify your risks Before there's ever a detention to begin with not the not the other way around And I know I think I'm out of time but Dr. Murphy Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for being here today is is my slideshow working Yeah, oh you can see it That's not my slideshow. Okay. I will power through and keep my fingers crossed that this my slideshow pops up So thank you all for being here. I'm really excited to be able to have an opportunity to talk to you today and really Just incredibly grateful Incredibly grateful to you all for being here at 8 a.m To all of you for committing your time and your energy to thinking about this issue that I take I'm quite passionate and concerned about Also, thanks to all of the Uyghur advocates who have put their lives and the lives of their families on the line To talk about what's happening in their home country in their homeland and whose work Inspires me to keep going even when I want to curl up in the fetal position and get under my desk and weep Because it's a lot of work. The work that you've seen represented here is Extraordinary and it's happened in a very quick fashion and it's because what we're talking about here today is Extraordinarily urgent. It is probably the I hope the worst human rights crisis. We'll see in our lifetimes And so I'm really grateful to all of you I'm also grateful to my team a lot of people have said my name in the last couple of days But I just want to say that my name is just an avatar for a team of Extraordinarily researchers many of whom are from the Kazakh and Uyghur communities who are living in exile whose families are in detention camps And who nonetheless put their lives and their families lives on the line to do this research and work with a kind of Passion and and an urgency that you can't possibly imagine and they inspire me every day And they some of them are named in our reports and many of them are unnamed because of the risk It is to them to do this work And so I'm grateful to them and our team not me but our team together have Written or contributed to six seven reports in the last two years that have traced the ways in which the Chinese government The PRC government has invested enormous resources in moving manufacturing to the Uyghur region intentionally to Transform that region and transforming that region they claim is a development project, but it is in fact a major integral part of a genocide I'm gonna talk to you today a little bit about that But I think Nuri and and El Nogar and others on the first couple of panels did a good job of helping us to understand that But what we do is we look at how that forced labor is affecting our International supply chains and try to produce the knowledge base that allows us to take action So we've looked at solar. We've looked at a cotton apparel. We've done research on PVC and built Building materials and we've looked at the automotive industry We've also looked at how this is financed locally and globally And we've looked in particular deeply at the Xinjiang production and construction core because it is a nefarious Institution that has no real precedent or comparison It is a colonial paramilitary corporate conglomerate that is bigger than anything you can imagine and it is The machine one of the machines by which the Uyghur people are Being oppressed and so we do this research For free for you Many of you think that we do it against you, but we do it for free for you because we Want to believe we try to believe that Business wants to be ethical wants to do the right thing and does not want to be doing their Making their profits on forced labor what the Chinese government is doing is artificially deflating prices by using forced labor And by using by having practically no environmental regulation in the Uyghur region the dirtiest possible Manufacturing goes on in that region because they they think of the people and of the region the land that they live on as Disposable and so we can't profit from that and I want to talk about that today the the thing that you That I think that might be being missed here is that the one when Kit talks about labor transfers and other folks talk about labor transfers That is a a Euphemism it's a it's a neat clean phrasing for it. It's a phrasing I use as well But it is a system of forced labor and the way we know that is because while labor transfers operate across the entirety of China In the Uyghur region they operate on a backdrop of extraordinary coercion That is that is mechanized that is operationalized through the threat of internment So a person in the Uyghur region could possibly like me I grew up in a tiny town in southern, Louisiana and I could not wait to get out of that town many people who are like rural kids Want to move to the big city and get a new job and have a new life that happens and Uyghur people are not different from that Some of them want to go work in a factory very few of them actually want to work in the factory though Many of them want to stay at home and live their lives and marry their you know High school sweethearts and have children and stay close to their families The thing about the situation in the Uyghur region is those labor transfers Somebody could say yes to them, but no one can say no No one can say no to resist a government program is to be aligned with terrorism This is directly written into government directives And so anyone who says no knows that they are Risking going to an internment camp and they know what happens there because there's no one in that region Who has not gone or bent or had a family member go to a camp? They know that there's rape and torture and violence in those camps and no one wants to take that and so they end up in a Factory making your shoes and your shirts and you know your electronics, etc. I'll tell you all of what that they're making We're not using some imaginary definition of forced labor here We use the ILO definition forced labor for our research. That's anything that's you know made under Under threat of penalty that person a person's not doing voluntarily, but I will tell you as a scholar of forced labor I've been working on forced labor globally for 20 years What is happening in the Uyghur region meets every single definition of forced labor? Human trafficking and slavery that I've ever seen and there's debates about what those terms mean This meets all of those definitions There are few things that experts in the world agree on but experts on forced labor agree on this this system is a massive and unprecedented of State-sponsored forced labor and so it is all of our duty to address this What do we do? I was asked to talk a little bit about what we do and how we do it so we We do what these guys are doing with machine learning Just with our eyes and like a behind a computer. We're like manually doing this stuff We we don't have anything fancy to do our work But we've we've developed a methodology that I think informs a lot of these platforms And I've talked to these folks and giving them whatever I can to help them understand what we were understanding You know before many of you were What we do is we start in the Uyghur region. We look for companies. Well, let me start here Let me back up we start with sectors that the Chinese government has Prioritized for investment in the Uyghur region when I first when we first came out with our report on solar They were like, why are you targeting us? We're trying to do a good thing and I am all for renewable energy I want our planet not to catch on fire but I also know that the Chinese government has intentionally held that market captive by moving polysilicon Manufacturing to the Uyghur region and by moving so much of it there. They're holding all of us captive they're holding the planet captive by moving manufacturing to that region and The thing is like Kit said you can just look at what's being manufactured in the Uyghur region The Chinese government makes a list every five years of what manufacturing they want to move to the Uyghur region I have Helpfully typed it up in my UFL PA submission if you would like to see that list And so the Chinese government tells us what they want to have manufactured there So we start with the things the Chinese government invests in and say, okay Let's look at that sector So we start we look at every company we possibly can in that sector in the Uyghur that's operating in the Uyghur region And then we start seeing do we can we find signs that they're engaging in forced labor? Do we know? if if they are You know doing labor transfers all the things that Kit just described are they operating in a prison? Are they operating in an internment camp? And and and are they operating through the labor transfers that affect 3.2 million Uyghur people in 2021? 3.2 million that's a Chinese government statistic 3.2 million Uyghur people of 12 million Take that for a second 3.2 million of 12 million Uyghur people were moved into labor transfers in 2021 Half of those people are children and elderly people so right like half of the population is being forced to work forced to work for us and So so we look at the things that the Chinese government invests in puts those people to work in we look at where? Those products go and we trace them out to international supply chains We have researchers who are fluent in Chinese and Uyghur and Kazak I want to encourage you all to hire people who know Chinese get some cultural competence, and I'm talking to you if you're Incorporate I'm talking to you if you're in the government Please hire more people who speak Chinese like like If you're if you're in tech if you're in academia if you're in nonprofits Like this information is available to us in Chinese the Chinese government advertises as corporations Advertise their engagement in these programs. This is what we do all day is look for those Advertisements of their participation in this work and who their customers are who their suppliers are etc We look at customs records, you know SEC filings Or you know IPOs we look at Chinese state media. We look at government doctrine documents and directives We look at individual testimonies We look at satellite imagery all of this stuff gets put together to create a portrait of what's going on the Uyghur region So that you so that place is no longer a black box people told us the Xinjiang region is a black box But the truth is if we can see it you can see it. It is all online. We are not hackers We don't know anything about the dark web like none of this stuff is how we we just we just Google it y'all We Google it in Chinese you can use Google translate. This is not like rockets It is by far not the most complicated intellectual project. I've ever in Like been on like this is not it's not that complicated And so I mean we work hard It's exhausting, but it's not like rocket science So if we can see it you can see it you can be doing this work. You can use these tools, but you could also Just Google your suppliers name in Chinese I cannot tell you how many companies tell me they do not know their suppliers Chinese name How do you know anything about your supplier if you don't even know what their name is? Right, and so what we do is we trace supply chains out to the rest of the world And what we're finding is that companies and whole industries have remained ignorant of their raw materials This is an image that's in my report. You can see it there in the in broad daylight report, but What we found is that many industries including the solar industry for instance did not know their supply chains beyond The the poly in this case of the poly silicon level they they when I presented my findings a year into the More into the solar industry taking responsibility and saying we want to change when I said the name Hoshine Everyone on the webinar said who is this who is Hoshine? What is this metallurgical grade silicon tell us about I'm like You guys are engineers. You know how this stuff works, right? But they had not looked at the raw materials They had not gone beyond that stage And and they had not gone to Xinjiang despite the fact that 45 percent of poly silicon was made in Xinjiang And they are not alone They are just the first group and the one that the Chinese government has targeted the most the renewable energy sector So if you're in another renewable energy sector y'all It's not just solar It's like we have got to address this issue because we have got to address other issues in the world including the burning planet And so we we have to Root this out. I've got some good news for you in a minute, but just hang in there So what we do is we look at we go as far as we can down into the raw materials we look at companies that are egregiously engaged in the the labor transfer programs Hoshine is an enthusiastic and and and Avid participant in the the like an architect in some ways of the of the the forced labor in the Uyghur region We document what they've done. We then say, okay, who are they selling to we look and see are they engaged in labor transfers? Then we say who are they selling to and lo and behold? They're often selling to the biggest Suppliers in our side of the world right Hoshine doesn't only supply the solar industry They supply the automotive industry they supply all kinds of rubber industries They they are they produce 38% of the world's metallurgical grade silicon 38% of the world's metallurgical grade silicon and Only half of it's consumed in the Uyghur region So we know that stuff is getting out and People aren't tracing it and this is not just in the solar industry I mean the thing that we keep trying to tell people is that it's not just solar. It's not just cotton It's not just What's the other tomatoes? It's it's it's shocking right we have looked at magnesium alloys. We've looked at paprika and garlic. We've looked at What else is a PVC as I said With all other kinds of forms of renewables we've What we can learn from the Chinese government is their intention to move as much Manufacturing to that region as they possibly can they're particularly focused on Raw materials processing as well, and let's see our report on on On the automotive industry, I kind of just want to take the cover off and put a new Cover on it every couple of days like take the automotive report on it put railway on it take the cover off put You know electronics on it because what we found when we started to dig into the 30,000 parts that make up a car Terrifying to try to do this work But what we found was that all we had to do was look at the basic materials the raw materials the aluminum Which isn't exactly a raw material but bear with me, but like aluminum and Copper and steel to be able to see that that the automotive industry was Why wildly exposed but so are any other industries that are that are making things with aluminum copper steel gold graphite So so because China has decided that they're going to move the dirty dirty Processing of the actual raw materials of bauxite and and iron to the Uighur region where they don't care What happens to the environment where where processes that are outlawed all over the world including in other parts of China Are still being practiced in in the Uighur region? complete impunity and so companies are moving to and and and Importantly all because there's a massive Coal reserve in the Uighur region where they are producing our renewable energy Making the highest carbon emissions you could possibly imagine right and so so what they're producing there is also Not really paying out on the on the environmental front either so What we found was that Everyone needs to be looking if you have any raw materials that are that that could possibly be processed in China They're moving to that region and you need to be looking at your supply chains to figure that out So people often ask me What should we be looking at next or or wink wink? What are you working on next doctor Murphy? And it doesn't matter what I'm working on next what matters is what the Chinese government is working on next right and so And and and the fact is they're working on the raw materials They're working on moving that raw materials processing to the Uighur region and so it affects all of our supply chains and we have the opportunity Some of us in this room have enormous economic leverage to make change in those arenas We can say we're not going to buy this in fact We cannot buy these goods if they're coming from the Uighur region because we can't ship them into the United States We have the opportunity to do the right thing and say we're not gonna just not buy those goods for the American market We're not gonna buy those goods for any market because who am I to be like? Oh, I'd like to buy your untainted Booth forced labor supply for this over here these folks over here But if you could just save me some of your forced labor made goods to send to Europe, that would be awesome Like what just think about like what that the implication of that is so so because you're knowingly knowingly choosing to buy things made with forced labor and so this is where I would start if I were you I Wouldn't be waiting for a report from us This too late right so What's happening though is that Chinese companies are catching on they delete things the minute I look at them, right? They the whole multinational corporations have deleted their entire websites because I put a thing on Twitter once This is really strange for as a small as a girl from small town Luling, Louisiana to be like stopping multinational corporations in their tracks. It's nonsense. What do they have to be afraid of? But like this is what's happening. They're erasing the evidence of their wrongdoing rapidly and And they're trying to change the game up I often use the analogy of the television show the wire Where like the drug dealers are constantly changing the game up and the police are trying to chase that But they're always a step behind of figuring out how they're doing what they're doing This is how our research work works, too We're always trying to see like how are they changing it up and and I was asked to To list ways that companies are obscuring their supply chains, and I couldn't even fit it on one slide And and you probably have a tiny the font is probably unreadable still But they're doing all kinds of things and we notice it every single day And this is we're doing manually But this is even easier to see on the platforms that you're you're being exposed to this week But we're seeing companies that have eliminated the names of their customers from their press releases like hey, we just sold so much of our goods for a five-year contact contract to a Party to be unnamed because that party no longer wants to be named as a as a purchaser of a good from a company that say maybe is you know got a WRO against them or They are bifurcating their supply chains and going around telling everyone hey look we've got this new supply chain Outside of the Uyghur region. It's absolutely untouched with Force labor and then they tell everyone that and then it turns out that only 10% of their supply is made Outside of that out of side of the Uyghur region supply chain, but everybody in Europe is like oh, it's gonna be okay I'm like y'all that stuff is going to the US that 10% is going to the US It's not being made for you and but everybody's being sold the same clean cotton They're all being sold the same clean polysilicon. Don't be fooled, right? We're also seeing companies change in the name of record this happened just on the on the flight here I was like Who is this company and the company was a company that I've spent a lot of time talking about But they just rearrange the names or rearrange the letters in their name in their shipping records or in their or they create Avatars like new companies that are not new companies at all because all of a sudden this new company has all of the Customers that the old company has And they're like oh no, we sold we sold this company We're still in the business, but we sold that factory to someone else You sold that factory in all of your biggest customers to that dude who used to be a manager in your factory Really? Okay, we'll see about that and so like we see see companies Exporting things through Shippers or subsidiaries or parents reports outside of the Uighur region and pretending like oh, you know We are no longer manufacturing in the Uighur region, but they manufacture everything in the Uighur region You have like it's it's not even I Mean it's like it almost feel like it's an insult It's an insult the like cat and mouse games that they're trying to play And it can't be successful we can see these things they're operating in the same address But they've changed their names they've sold the company to someone, but they haven't actually don't have any records of sale But they they tell me oh we sold that company, but of course they're still operating we're seeing custom brokers that step in and and Import things that you can within two steps like a two minute search You can see are coming directly from the Uighur region including from Chen Guang Chen Guang by the way is also deeply engaged in labor transfers and expropriating Uighur lands and so we are seeing all kinds of ways that companies are falsifying their documents paying for audits where Americans are telling them that they've got a clean bill of health in the Uighur region and it's not true So we're seeing we're seeing all kinds of ways that companies are obscuring their supply chains and trying to fool you and to Continuing to buy their products. I Want to take a minute To reflect on what this means and what it is we're doing here by reciting all this information and reminding ourselves of Of our risk in this world. I Regularly hear from businesses about the risk. We need to you know limit our risk our exposure We need to limit our financial risk our legal risk And as a human rights researcher, I think you're talking about the wrong risk Right there are 12 million people in the Uighur region 12 million people who every single day are terrified That they will have a sack put over their heads that they will disappear the night people who go to sleep wearing layers of clothes So that when they end up in an internment camp, they have underwear, right? We are talking about a risk to 12 million people who are working in your supply chains You I hear businesses talk about. Oh, there's a risk to my Chinese worker on the ground in China because if we talk About forced labor if we say the word Xinjiang We will we will risk our workers lives Three million Uighur workers work for you. You may not pay them directly. No one pays them directly and You are profiting from them and you are talking about your business risk your legal risk I am talking about the risk of participating in a genocide of Financing a genocide because that's what we're doing and Consumers can only do so much to prevent that I can only do so much Wearing of my used clothes to be able to prevent that The people in this room have a responsibility To make sure that these folks who are saying I don't want to go and work in this factory I want to stay with my family. I don't want my children to go to a boarding school where they'll be only taught in Chinese I don't want my elders to be put in an elder care facility. I don't want my land to be taken away from me I don't want to have my land polluted. I don't want to people who are Not wanting to do this work are doing it. They're doing it for us and They're you're making money from it. So I don't want to hear Like talking about risk to your business I like talking about risk to the Uighur people and until you are doing every single thing you can do to Make sure that you change what's happening for the Uighur people or at least make sure that you're not profiting from it So you're doing every single thing you can do you should not sleep at night. I Mean it. I don't know how you do it and so All of that said I think there's some reasons for us to be optimistic and I'm out of time, but I'm going on I think there's some reasons for us to be optimistic I think that we have together done some pretty incredible things to address this crisis It's it's remarkable as someone who I who lived in the Uighur region who's watched this Situation deteriorate over 20 years to see how people have come together And how quickly we've been able to make change when people finally recognized how urgent this situation is I Think that there are ways that we know that what we're doing is working and we need to remind ourselves of it We're seeing the expansion of Manufacturing capacity outside of China and outside of the Uighur region Increase more quickly than we would have were we not paying attention to this human rights violation a lot of people said Oh, if we and still do oh if we look at what's happening to the Uighurs We will slow down our route to addressing climate change. We will slow down manufacturing. We'll slow down our economy I say it's worth it, but Even for you for you who have to build things and make things and sell things. I get it. You have a job, too We're actually seeing diversified supply chains come on board More quickly because you're having to find a way to buy things outside of that region. This is good for all of us It's good for the planet. It's good for the economy. It makes supply chains more sustainable This is actually happening. We're seeing it happening. It's real We're also seeing increased innovation the deflated the artificially deflated prices of goods made in the Uighur region meant that we were not able to invest in Expensive innovations because we could always buy things so damn cheap because no like the Uighur people were being forced to work and their lands were Being expropriated in their land was being polluted and so those artificially deflated prices Created a lack of competition both in like supply chains and then and manufacturing and in innovation We're seeing more innovation be able to come out There's also investment on government's part to try to address this and make it possible to diversify supply chains and that I think Was sped up or maybe even created in a way by addressing by the desire to address this crisis We're also seeing Chinese some few very few Chinese companies come out and say we're no longer participating in the labor transfer programs It's very few of them. We're not seeing and this is the thing the the rebuttal poor presumption question There's nothing I want more in the world than to find the Schindler who is out there in the Uighur region like employing a whole bunch of Uighurs Protecting them making sure none of them end up in an internment camp But let me tell you something the people who are working in the Uighur region watch their colleagues Disappear in the night and they don't shut down their factories. They don't say. Oh, that's it I'm not doing this anymore. They keep producing stuff for you And so and for the for Xi Jinping and for the Chinese government, right? So we are in a situation where Chinese government companies outside of the Uighur region a couple of them have said We're not going to use those programs anymore because of international pressure because of brand pressure That needs to keep happening and they need to be more public about it And we're seeing China changes in PRC government repression They're lowering the visible signs of their repression But forced labor is the space in which they're really Cracking down on people and being able to control them and so we need to keep putting pressure on forced labor We're also seeing international human rights due diligence move more quickly That might not be your favorite thing in the world. It is my favorite thing in the world and people who are Who work in labor rights have been fighting for this stuff for 20 years and now we're seeing it actually come to fruition And we're seeing we're seeing you guys Create new tech to try to help us map this And I want to also be sure to like make a Plea to those of you who are in the tech side too this information if a company can put it in their desk and ignore it You are also not doing everything you can and so to that end I want to announce that we My team and Sheffield and Northeastern University are putting together a free online supply chain tracing platform using the insights that we Have gained to be able to make it possible for you to do some of that tracing for free We're small. We're scrapping. We don't have two billion dollars from the US government to do this work, but I don't know anybody does but But we are we're at it So it won't be as fancy as the things that you guys are talking about here But we will be able to show you some of the insights that we're gaining and be able to put that stuff in an automated system So you can see supply chain trace Supply chain mapping this will be coming out in a pilot version at the end of the year It's no time soon. Please buy the products that you're hearing about now. Do not wait But we are gonna do that and that's because we want small and medium enterprises to be able to actually afford to do this Not just the big guns and because we want When companies don't do what they should do we want journalists and nonprofit advocates and and and people like me to be able to hold them to account and And so That is me. I am way out of time But thank you very much for your for your time. I want to welcome everyone back So exciting to kick off our industry presentations for the rest of the day here So first of all, we're gonna start off with Deloitte Deloitte financial advisory services So they're gonna be discussing their integrated technical capabilities to increase supply chain transparency Accelerate that accelerate analyst decision-making and illuminate supply chain risks across industry So presenting for Deloitte. We've got two two speakers. We've got Mr. Philip Ghiakini, who is the senior manager and for Magnified product owner. Mr. Ghiakini is a senior manager in the Deloitte strategy and analytics practice where he serves as a Product owner for the magnified platform He has spent 10 years building and delivering analytics platforms for the federal government focused on putting mission data In the hands of operators to more quickly and efficiently respond to a changing landscape of new threats and priorities And also from Deloitte. We've got miss Antoinette Wolner Who was the manager for investigations and intelligence? Ms. Wolner lived in Beijing for several years and is part of Deloitte's intelligence and investigations practice Uses her language and regional knowledge to gather information On chinese corporate networks for federal law enforcement clients including support to cp's national targeting center on cases regarding forced labor in the Xinjiang region Miss Wolner's skills include identifying niche international information and datasets that may be incorporated into data accelerators Or used to illuminate unknown network connections Like to welcome Philip and Antoinette Thanks for that great intro Thank you all. You know Mr. Choi did an excellent job already of giving us a brief introduction Just to reiterate my name is Antoinette Wolner. I'm a manager in Deloitte's investigations and intelligence practice And in that role I help clients access a multitude of data sources. I'm Leveraging a tailored tradecraft tools techniques and my own in-country experience in China To assist in the development of holistic understandings of the operating ecosystems I'm around persons or entities of interest with me today. Phil Giacchini. I'll give him a few minutes to just quickly go back through his background Thanks. Phil Giacchini senior manager in analytics practice. I have the honor of being the product owner for the magnify asset Over my tenure at Deloitte I've built a number of systems for the federal government And now I've focused time and energy in building internal tools for folks like Antoinette to use throughout their day to day And accelerate the workflows and the contract delivery that they're That they're supporting throughout the government And two of our leaders were also on that slide Vaden ball and Kerry Crowley Vaden sort of my analog in the analytics practice. Kerry also supports commercially enabled intelligence along with Antoinette I'm moving right along into our discussion of our current understanding and methodology regarding supply chain illumination I'm at Deloitte anti-human trafficking and forced labor Prevention is an important part of our delivery. We're deployed across industry and in the federal space where we utilize an integrated approach through our magnify tool as well as our practitioners skill sets and Analytic capabilities to develop better understandings of business networks and insights into their supply chains So industry supply chains stretch around the globe Competition has brought more developing countries into those supply chains Which increases the prevalence of forced labor at multiple points within them regulatory measures like import bans of For example cotton or other raw textiles materials from Xinjiang can be effective But um, you know, as we've heard a lot today, these global supply chains can be really opaque And even with regulations like section 307 and the more recent Uyghur forced labor prevention act I'm imports, which are in violation can still slip through the cracks so Our highly trained teams with regional um foreign language expertise subject matter expertise in data data science targeting and network analysis have depended on a proven methodology to assist clients in Developing a better understanding of business networks and generating insights into their supply chains So Phil's going to walk us through some of the technical aspects of this methodology so our our platform was born of Trying to solve the problem For for folks like Antoinette on how can we aggregate? commercial data, how can we aggregate mission data or or private data? Establish relationships amongst the entities within that data and more quickly identify risky relationships Creating 360 degree views of an individual or business or some other entity that might live within your data And use that automated generation of of the link chart that you see here using a graph database to Accelerate report generation dossiers intel reports and also use the tool and the technology to Draw the attention to the users that to to entities that they may not Previously have had on their radar. So using those relationships to high-risk individuals we can create non-intuitive connections and and really sort of start to elicit the Full supply chain set of relationships that might exist amongst commercial data and and internal mission data Sort of the workflow for the asset the the the way that we found Really sort of takes advantage of both the technology and the data we have available is we know that our customers and internally have access to just a multitude of databases flat files Apis So how do we ingest that and we've created a data pipeline around pulling all that data together and writing it into sort of a Unified schema so that we can start to create those relationships. So, you know, I may have a phone number Antoinette may have a phone number. We may have exchanged phone calls She has an address or some criminal history and I can start to tie her data to other potentially bad actors and one of the challenges with pulling all that data into the Platform is how do we know that the phil jikini from system a and the phil jikini from system b are actually the same So there's been a big investment in integrating number of different entity resolution Tools as well so that we can get the complete view of a single entity Rather than have to sort of disambiguate records across a number of different systems Once it's in the what's in the platform sort Probably very familiar view for a lot of you folks This link chart idea where you can just point and click and explore and compare entities amongst each other And once we start to sort of elicit that entire view of an entity or their organization have a workflow specifically built out for Generating reports a lot of times our our deliverables are reports back to our customers on a on a specific selector or a number of folks so Rather than having everyone hand jam that data into a into a word doc or a pdf We can we can create that in a couple clicks A lot of features that we've built out I talked about a few of them with entity resolution The I think the the crux of the problem is the entity comparison and understanding Who are the similar entities that I should be paying attention to so a lot of time and energy into creating views that show Everything I know about phil And then using some of the algorithms in the back end to create similarity scores across other records So sort of like a slider and I can see phil jikini and philip jikini and maybe philip M jikini and and start to compare those entities so that me as the user can also make some assumptions or or make a decision around whether or not they're the same Um actual entity I think in the law enforcement space one of the things I learned is that we really didn't want the system to dictate When entities were in fact the same So giving the user Some knobs and levers to tune Which entities are related and which aren't and then sort of feeding that back into the system to help with To need any red entity resolution algorithms has been been really huge for the team Once we get the data into that format Now that we have entities with established relationships living across our our platform We can do some really interesting in entity analytics as well. So understanding common patterns Within the graph and within the sets of relationships that we we know are our problematic We can use a suite of algorithms And some a i and m l sprinkled throughout to help with identifying similar, but maybe unknown Networks of bad actors. We call it community detection. It's one of the things I'm more excited about it across the whole tool Because what I can do is create Additional entities right almost like a false entity that represents a community of interest Whether they have sort of an anti pattern in the relationships that we see across their data or even relationships Two or three degrees away that have high risk individuals, you know built off of models that use criminal history data To really understand who I might need to be paying attention to and then we can load that into a leads A leads view and have the the user the analyst Actually have a short list of potentially high risk Communities and and supply chains sort of right at their fingertips and they can dive in from there Thanks so much fel so On the screen now is an example of how this might all come together To illuminate supply chain risks or to expand the scope for enforcement once those risks are identified I'm so the general opacity of a global supply chain is powdered in a country of origin like china where I'm the amount and availability of public information is tightly controlled and regulated So in this fictionalized example a us company has terminated its relationship with a supplier following allegations that the supplier was using forced labor I'm cbp may be made aware of those allegations and take measures to ensure that Products from the supplier don't enter the united states for consumption I'm but in this example, that's only part of the whole picture, right So our teams might start with Some manual research and international records to identify enough information on the owners and operators of that entity alleged abusing forced labor So that we can confidently conduct entity resolution in magnify When we then pull that information into magnify, we can rapidly conduct a federated search across domestic and international records to just very quickly establish additional ownership links to More companies that are producing and supplying similar products right So The manual aspect of this research is really important and often necessary as dr. Laura murphy mentioned earlier, right? This information is available, but it's often published in native language only or is restricted to access behind paywalls You know some of the most information rich data sources in china For example, don't make that information available via api polls Or through, you know large commercial corporate records aggregators We do understand however also the importance of tech enabling our investigation so that we can maintain the speed and scale That's necessary for you all to have operational relevance As such, you know deloitte's kind of unique combination of providing access to those foundational third party data providers Our agile and agnostic approach to go out and identify start integrating whichever niche data is applicable for your specific use case And our highly configurable models, which we use to integrate all of these components Through the graph database that phil was showing you has proven really critical for us to deliver consistent Efficient and complete targeting packages for our customers So with that we would like to use, you know, whatever time we have left to answer any of your questions Thank you all for your time. I'll be around for the rest of the day So just please come find me if if there is anything you think of right next up is uh, sciari sciari analytics So sciari is a commercial risk intelligence platform to protect finance trade and security systems by illuminating illuminating global commercial networks that provide instant worldwide corporate transparency And supply chain risk identification and presenting for sciari today is uh, is mr. Farley mesco Is the chief executive officer Farley is the ceo of sciari sciari labs of venture backton And founder led commercial risk intelligence provider Provider serving government and regulated industries the former chief operating officer of c4 ads a national security research organization He has consulted for multilateral In united states government institutions on financial crime Issues and testified in congress on the use of open source data to combat terrorist financing His academic works have been published by united nations brookings the world bank and many others Farley thanks everybody And thanks for the opportunity to be here today presenting on such an important topic And thanks to as well to um cbp for hosting us. You guys have been awesome partners for the past few years My name is farley. I'm the ceo of sciari In terms of just a quick agenda I'm going to kind of quickly introduce us Talk about what it is that we do Then i'm going to talk about how we apply our data in tech specifically to force labor risk identification And then i'm going to close with just a quick note about how we fit into the broader ecosystem of supply chain tech And then of course i'll be happy to kind of take questions at the end So jumping right in Who we are This is us in a nutshell. We're a software as a service company That collects billions of corporate documents Hundreds of millions of trade records from corporate registries and customs agencies around the world From hundreds of different countries across disparate levels of uh, or types of data levels of quality structure foreign language, etc And we parse transform and resolve all of that messy, uh data into a nice clean picture of Companies and their relationships who owns them who controls them? Who do they do business with where do they source from etc? Once we have that clean picture of companies We then Match those that reference data to various types of risk content. So Watch lists like the u of lpa watch list The o-fac list the global equivalents of those lists There was some discussion of adverse media yesterday. So we do include adverse media peps And basically all of that reference data the core reference data and then the risk insights on top of that Get served up in a very lightweight software as a service sass platform And that allows analysts to do essentially two things. So number one Um search or batch potentially large amounts of suppliers entities third parties Against all of that core reference data and risk data and then number two Once you've found something interesting potentially risky, etc We do then allow you to conduct deeper diligence and adjudication of those potential matches Within our platform, which i'll show you in a minute Um, but the idea is basically the the batch and the investigation all in one lightweight sass platform It's also deployable private clouds for those with data sensitivity concerns And at enterprise scale up to thousands of thousands of users um Our fundamental value proposition here is that basically we can have your teams up and running with uh Forced labor risk identification risk assessment within hours, right? It's lightweight sass So you can do kind of a key piece of your overall Forced labor due diligence program not the whole thing but a key piece of it You can get it up and running in hours leveraging You know insights from the billion, you know plus node scale analytics that we're doing in the back end And bringing as much or as little of your data to us as you want um And we can do all of that basically for the cost of about equivalent cost of about a single trade compliance analyst salary um, we know that this is a Very fast-paced regulatory environment We also are aware that uh, risk and compliance budgets at your institutions haven't necessarily You know tracked that increased focus by law enforcement. We want to be responsive to that reality Haven't talked a lot about the cost of all these solutions the last couple days But I think it's an important one that we can't uh that we can't gloss over um So let me talk a little bit Just in more detail about what we're looking for in the data with regards to forced labor specifically And then what we can deliver for you all all right, uh forced labor risk assessment specifically this is a non exhaustive list of some of the different Risk indicators that we that we look for in the data. So kind of in the top bucket here You can see that We have very Supplier-centric questions So who is my supplier and what do they do? Where are they located? You know, are they a match to a watch list like the uf lpa entity list Do they have an address in a place like xinjiang? Maybe they haven't disclosed it to you, but maybe it appears in the chinese public records that we scan Do they appear in any of the media reporting around these issues? So the obvious kind of supplier-centric stuff and so on We have records of about 400 million companies 450 million companies worldwide about 90 million of those are in china alone So we can get very very granular on some of these supplier-centric questions But then down in the second bucket here, uh, you can see some of the risk factors that are more uh non obvious, right? Entities, uh, you know in this bucket would be risky because of their relationships because of their networks potentially out multiple hops And we're only able to kind of surface these risk factors Because of our ability to bring together this high quality primary source information And to resolve it all together Draw linkages and then kind of run our network based approach to analytics across that connected data So across that big, you know connected picture So basically gives us the ability to say not only is my supplier on a list You know, but maybe their owner is on a list or a subsidiary or a factory or a trading partner or their trading partners trading partner So you can kind of string together these again these kind of multi hop risk questions So in short we cover the obvious risks. We also cover the non obvious risks and the really insidious Supply chain risk, especially with forced labor Do tend to be you know buried deep within either these sub tier supplier networks as we've heard about The ownership the nested ownership and control structures of these businesses And you know, I think the unfortunate reality is you don't always get the whole picture from your supplier disclosures You know, it's obviously that's a key piece of it Where we come in is we provide that outside in kind of external check or validation Of what you are or are not seeing in your supply chain mapping tprm in trade management systems so um If that is the what of what we're seeking to identify again a non exhaustive list of the what Let's quickly take a look at what this all looks like in the product itself Okay These are just some product shots, but we basically do two different but related things here First as I mentioned you can search one or upload up to I think it's 25 000 entities at a time I see your suppliers trading partners, etc We'll match resolve and enrich those suppliers for you. It takes just a minute or two And then we flag any entities of yours that Our potential matches to those in our system That have the pre computed risk factors, you know, including the dozen or so I listed on the previous slide um You know, do they own factories, you know co-located with the prison in china, uh, you know, etc So that's kind of the first thing that we do But you can imagine that in order to Sort of answer these sub tier supplier questions that I was talking about We also have to do a tremendous amount of pre mapping of supplier networks Um We have to pre map have pre map suppliers suppliers their corporate networks, you know, at least again what we can see From the outside looking in using the public data using the commercially available data that we that we source uh, so the second thing that we do Is we give you the ability to click through kind of to the more detailed graph or dossier or dashboard views Which I don't have screenshots of but the other more detailed more investigator style views of the data So in this case, you would see, you know, you click through and you would see the sub tier supplier relationships of the us importer You know as disclosed again in customs data tracing back to xinjiang with shipments all posts ufl pa implementation Um, and to get this detailed picture again, you know, kind of working from right to left on on your screen We have to basically resolve together us import records Import and export data and corporate data from columbia from mexico from ecuador from india And then export and corporate data from china on the other side of the screen So you get this complete kind of contextualized picture of a sub tier supplier network like this so basically if an entity has a Pattern like this in our system again across those billions hundreds of millions billions of nodes in our system We flag it We flag it with a you know in that in that previous batch view and kind of throughout the product Depending on how you're interacting with it And then your teams again can kind of click through and explore This more detailed view double click on nodes to you know, expand their networks add their corporate hierarchy Do the same graph as the supplier network But this is the product again the outside in view of the supply chain using public and commercial data And I think that last point is a good segue you've heard it kind of throughout this event an important caveat to everything i've just said Is that we provide a piece of the puzzle a robust piece of the puzzle but a very much outside in view of the supply chain We want to make it easy for you to integrate us with other tools and systems including maybe the inside out view from your supplier system of record Really down to that bill of materials level and tracing back to you know to the factory level So so we want to make it easy to integrate with us And integrate us with your existing systems So i'll quickly hit that And then open it up for questions So as I said, we're lightweight sass. There's a ton you can do with our platform We can definitely deploy as a standalone risk identification adjudication tool But given that it is lightweight sass. We're also you know very aware of the fact that we can't do any do everything And we've tried to make it easy to integrate with your existing systems So this is roughly how it all fits together kind of the upfront risk identification some of the adjudication work diligence work Can be done in Sayari again either on kind of a one-off basis or or you know utilizing the the batch functionality We can also consume data from your supplier system of record from your supply chain mapping the outputs of your supply chain mapping systems and processes And then we can also push out our risk factors our risk indicators to You know either your third party risk management system, you know for supplier onboarding monitoring And then to your global trade management system as well for for screening And then finally we do actually support quite a number of responsible sourcing teams again who have a very important role to play in Program design oversight and conducting forced labor due diligence so To recap For us, you know, we're a sass platform Which identifies these potentially risky suppliers around the world based not only on the obvious criteria, but also on the network to kind of a non-obvious criteria And then the kind of the second thing we do is we give your team the tools to Dig deeper into those supplier maps those corporate networks either in our tool or across Your broader set of systems All with the ultimate goal of course of identifying potential forced labor concerns managing legal reputational risk If something goes wrong potentially Giving you visibility as to why law enforcement may have made a detention or seizure And but though in an ideal world kind of proactively You know avoiding supply chain disruptions before law enforcement gets involved in the first place so Thank you. That's it. Um, I really look forward to your questions and please do find me afterwards if you want to discuss further Hi, Caroline Dale from flexport. Um, thank you. First of all, I think one of the more valuable things that I can see out of Sayari in particular is the mapping of the related entities Um, especially getting into PRC entities where it's a tougher challenge for non-journey speakers Um, but going back to what dr. Murphy mentioned this morning with regard to name changes Subsidiaries being established Can you speak a bit to how the platform adapts and ensures that there's an awareness on the company side of those sorts of changes from their suppliers? Yeah, uh, for sure So the question certainly is uh is is about The the velocity of data and data changes that we have to deal with Yeah, I mean I think the ultimate goal for us And again, we're talking 100 million plus multi 100 million plus node scale here is to Rebuild our global graph every week to two weeks um, and so we Uh, we do that every two weeks and we try to introduce You know new or or kind of refreshed data on existing entities at Monthly quarterly some jurisdictions like china again, it takes a long time to get through 90 million companies but at the very least Kind of with that quarterly cadence and then again, it's all it gets all resolved using the same Entity resolution logic that we use and so we do pick up those name changes And everything else We pick up new trade records for those entities But yeah, it's a huge data management problem data management challenge for sure But one that's very much top of mind Hey, um, thanks for the presentation. I think that the platform looks really cool. Um And I just to clarify, um, I think you also make a really good point about the cost too Just to clarify for him initially. So is a mapping plus diligence tool That companies could use for for part of both of those objectives Yeah, I'm sorry. I can barely hear you. But yes, that is uh, that is uh, that is exactly what it is It is a it's a piece of mapping and a piece of diligence. Great. Awesome. Um, I have a question So you you mentioned the um risk identification and then also the risk assessment And I I appreciated you guys putting up the various factors that you look at for the risk assessment and identification piece Um, I'm wondering if you can speak to how when the flags do pop up How you weight those so do you have like low medium and high risk that gets weighted flagged for the customer? Or is it all just kind of one flag? Um, it's a good question. So right now, um There's there's a elevated high critical kind of schema or ontology Um Something that is a match to the OFAC list is going to be rated higher than something that has adverse media about a You know potentially using forced labor or something like that So we have to have some stratification there, but I think our ultimate goal is to move this more qualitative and thematic rather than a force rank like that because it's frankly different for everybody You know, and I think we We want to we want to we want to kind of own the qualitative and we want to put that the knobs in the hands of the The the users for for the um severity. That's awesome. Okay. Thank you. Yeah Anything else going ones. All right. Thank you everybody. Appreciate it. All right next presenting is everstream analytics We'll be presenting on technology solutions for comprehensive sub tier ufl pa risk assessments So presenting for everstream is, uh, mr. Jim Hayden Who is the chief data scientist for everstream analytics? Jim is an innovator in creating analytical solutions to solve emerging problems in the finance helic communication communications and supply chain industries Jim leads the data science teams and building scalable predictable predictive and prescriptive supply chain risk solutions Before joining everstream analytics, Jim was the chief technology officer at savvy technology a leader in iot and big data analytics technologies for supply chains And vice president and chief strategy officer at mantis A global leader in the trading compliance and anti-money laundering software market Jim I guess we also got it up. So john as well. Okay. Also, we have, uh, john bovin also presenting John is the head of discover and ufl pa at everstream analytics John is the head of uh, where he focuses on automated multi-tier mapping and foresaber technology solutions He has more than 30 years experience as a technology leader and solutions straight at strategists at firms such as kpmg ariba Zalink or avo cvm solutions sales force in oracle He's authored numerous articles and blogs on supply chain risk sourcing procurement and supplier management has been recognized as a pro to know By supply and demand chain executive Again, uh, just wanted to say, uh, thanks everybody for uh, for uh, listening today and uh, thanks to the cbp for the invitation as well Just a little bit about everstream analytics. Um, we are a Called a general purpose platform for supply chain risk And resiliency management We have, uh, hundreds of customers some of the biggest and brands, uh, brand names out there from you know, seamans google Dupont and others we we span lots of different industries From automotive to high tech to food and bev Retail high tech medical device pharmaceutical. So we have a lot of risk specific supply chain risk experience particularly in risk identification risk monitoring and also mapping of sub tiers which Part of what we're going to talk about today We have received numerous awards Most recently and I saw some of our other presenters also talking about we were recognized by fast company as a An innovative company. Uh, we were number three around data Data and analytics. So we're really proud of that What we wanted to talk about today was was obviously specific to ufl pa risk We've we've been doing, you know supply chain risk management as I mentioned and being a platform provider for More than 10 years. Obviously ufl pa risk and forced labor risk More recently and we were looking at some very addressing some very specific Challenges that we saw when we started working with our clients in this area Let me highlight a couple of them The first was is As we've seen from a lot of the presenters, you know, you want to be Proactive versus reactive if you wait for something to happen It's too late. It's tough to get out of jail for, you know, free as we we've all talked about over the last few days So proactive versus reactive the other challenges was around, you know, customers didn't have access They couldn't pierce the veil into their sub tier supply chain. So having that visibility into the sub tiers very challenging Um, the other is is how do I do this at a mass scale? So as you saw some of our clients, they have tens 20 30 50 000 global suppliers So being able to do one at a time, you know to look for ufl pa risk just wasn't an option They needed to do this at scale And then the other side of it is it can't be a single project It's got to be something that you can do on a continuous scalable basis And so it needs to be something that can can continuously go on and continuously monitor So these are some of the challenges that that we identified From a key requirements to address this we really focused on these Areas the first was was main building and maintaining a continuously updated ufl pa watch list. In fact, we call it an expanded watch list and we'll cover that in in more detail We also leveraged our ability. We and I am I'm the global owner of Everstream discover which is by itself a sub tier mapping capability So we leveraged our ever stream discover to connect the dots both upstream and downstream From the watch list members We needed the ability to do this as I mentioned at scale flexible matching from A client's you know tier one and what you buy from whom to to this complex watch list The other thing that you need is you need an ability to to have a flexible analytics and reporting So some clients want to look at an excel spreadsheet. Some want to look at complex analytics dashboards Reports we want to have that platform and finally you need an ability to to assess the risk and prioritize the most risky Identified connections on the ufl pa to the bottom So you want to it's all around risk because you can't fix necessarily everything at once but you can prioritize So taking a risk assessment approach So what did we come up with? So this is our solution specific to Ufl pa risk and the first is is as I mentioned we built out our own Expanded ufl pa watch list and we did that by of course starting with who's on the the the u.s Government published list we then added and branched out into other NGOs and other research and other Names that we could put on looked in media looked at reports as we've we've heard over the last few days They're constantly being added We then look for aliases subsidiaries corporate relationships And then look for suppliers with also locations in the high risk areas So and and then we take that list And then we build the sub tier connections who are their customers who are their customers customers and so forth And that's what we refer to as our expanded watch list We in order to do that and build that out in a sustainable manner. We do leverage our Our ever stream discover product, which its sole job is to make those connections is a multi-tier automated AI based data-based Discovery method to put those together not only the at the supplier, but the location and the product level as well We then built a very sophisticated matching Algorithms so that we can then because we have this watch list built out We have the customer gives us, you know lots and lots of their suppliers We can then put them together and then come up with a risk a risk priority as I mentioned So there's that area and then there's the whole we have a very rich and sophisticated platform for reporting Analytics and also incident monitoring. We have what we call an intelligence solutions team that actually reports to jim Who's going to talk next around kind of how do we enable this? Thanks, john. I'm here to talk about a little bit about the how we do this. I'm the chief data scientist It's a tech expo. I won't get too technical on you though So first we start with our customer suppliers and then we match them to our expanded watch list That sounds easy enough That first part's really hard. We ask our customers for their tier one suppliers and they go here you go They come from erp systems. They come from transportation management systems. They come from s and op systems Our customers as you saw from the list, there are fortune 100 companies One of them has 39 different erp systems. All those vendors are showing up in multiple systems there So the first thing we do and thanks to the previous speakers for explaining entity resolution for me We do entity resolution on that and that gets us to this Consolidated list and there's a valuable byproduct for our customers there. We can go back and say, did you know these four customers that are being Used for procurement at four different divisions or the same supplier Why don't you get some leverage there now that you understand your company dealing with that supplier? Then on the other side, it's build this expanded watch list So the first tier there are the names and companies on the list And then the next year who they sell to and the next year is who they sell to So we're building out this network of not only the origin of the material from the entity of interest What do their customers are? We're able to do that like the previous speakers. We have a knowledge graph that's built up using open source data using Any data we can get our hands on so Over half of it is import export records from about 75 different countries That's notoriously dirty data comes through customs And so there's a lot of entity resolution that needs to happen there not only that This is where people play games and they use different slightly different names They use billing addresses instead of the real facility where it came from So you need some reference data to help you out there. So once you understand who the entity is And you know what port they're shipping it out of you don't really know the facility it came from So we have reference data sources global directories of chemical manufacturers and automotive OEMs And that helps us fill in the blank to get to the true facility We're a location-based risk company And knowing the facility is really key to us. We've applied meteorologists that forecast typhoons. We have People that use nlp on news to look for facility fires things like that. So this is just part of what we do Those are the two major components once we've done that we can do some matching John mentioned this watch list. So we start with the name suppliers And then we derive any subsidiaries or aliases from our reference data sources Using a lots of different similarity metrics. We're using graph based technology here And this helps a lot with identifying aliases as an example So not only we're looking for the name and the address and they look similar. Did they change a few letters? But we're using context too. What are they shipping? How frequently do they ship? Who are their customers? That's all in the knowledge graph and you could include that in your analysis for similarity That gives you a much higher match rate on things like people trying to disguise names slightly I mentioned we're a location-centric risk platform. So we know suppliers locations this reference data sources help us a lot with that And then we know high risk product materials. This is what we've been doing for a living for a long time Who what and where is the risk? And that's what we tell our customers. We try to give them as much context as possible As we're deriving these relationships as we're resolving these entities We're giving confidence scores. We have this much confidence that these are the same two entities So when you're making decisions about taking action, you have that available When we're making decisions on these are trading partners There's a confidence score based on how frequently they trade the number of products they trade How recently they traded the number of different data sources that told us they were trading partners All of that goes into giving you confidence about the data. We're showing you where there's potential risk So i'm going to show you an example here We started with the entity on the watch list on top And we've derived that there's a subsidiary and an alias We then found out who they're selling to and who they're selling to We come in with our customers tier one supplier And we start at the top and see if they match any of these And in this case our customer Has abc corp as a supplier And they happen to be a customer of the company using the alias And then they happen to be a customer of a customer Of the subsidiary subsidiary of the top entity there So this gives them a view of where we did the matches We do some risk scoring Actually the closer to the top we feel the more risk there is it's a direct at your tier one Is this company on the entity list and then the further down you go it gets a little fuzzier But we that's why we give some confidence scores to help make decisions there And finally is our platform again. We try to give as much context as possible So when somebody's determining the action to take they have all the information we could possibly give them And i uh I have to say this as a data scientist. This is machine learning based at the very essence of it It's statistics. It's not black and white. And so There should be a human in the loop before any actions taken here And just to round out the presentation We we do also have a continuously monitor a continuous monitoring service as well Constantly looking for updates, whether it's updating Who's on the watch list other others that are found that'll be added and and balanced out as well Or if there's certain things that happen in the region As well as in this example, so we have a separate team This is all they do not just for force labor, but for fires weather everything. So this is just one aspect of what we do And uh, as I as I mentioned earlier, um, this is actually part of uh, what enables this is our everstream discover Which is the component that actually does all the data science multi-tier mapping In an automated fashion And this is what we use to build out all these connections specifically for force labor and in this example Obviously around ufl pa, but this is a something we could spend literally a long time on and and some of our Other presenters have drilled into some some similar concepts Just just to to finish up with some of the recent findings We have been helped working with quite a number of clients, especially over the last few months Identify where the potential ufl pa Risks are so just wanted to throw up some statistics on what what we're seeing In in these analyses and most of the the projects that we work on are Over 10,000 supplier locations Around the world. So these are big, you know big projects. That's from a tier one specific example We also are seeing a match rate in other words How many connections at what percent rate are we seeing to somebody on the on the watch list? Whether it's several tiers away and we're seeing on average one to three percent So um, that is just something that we're seeing just to share, you know to the to everybody out there What we're also seeing is tiers three and four are the most common Tears where things are matching. So if you're trying if you need to do mapping going down to at least tier three And four appears to be the sweet spot The other thing that we are seeing is there's a lot of as we've heard, you know Across the last two days a lot of different products are are making the connect are involved in the connections And the top one that we've noticed is electronics. So clearly electronics and we've heard a lot around that is is a big area So again just kind of giving you some of our our findings And just i'll end with again, we're a platform company We've been doing this for you know over 10 years and there's a lot of elements to our platform This is just one particular product to help clients specifically with ufl pa But you know around helping them understand and identify You know potential incidents that impact their supply chain map their supply chain Where all the locations are? And identify risks You know across lots of different dimensions of that is and then also linking into their enterprise systems That that's a lot of what we do so With that we will move on to any questions and again, thank you for for listening Hey there, um, mary mackael from miller and chevalier. Thanks for a great presentation um, this idea of confidence scores is really interesting to me and I like the way that you sort of Talk about how there are kind of different levels of risk based on the confidence scores I'm wondering do you provide insight on your platform to your customers about why a confidence score is the way it is And sort of what the risks associated with that are Some of that secret sauce it comes out of the algorithm and A little bit black box, but we do we we tell them the features that go into that confidence score And as I mentioned, here's a few of them Frequency of transactions between the two recency of transaction between the two Number of different data sources that were used to validate that relationship just as an example of some of the few So they know that and and this is A confidence score is just a relative score A 90 doesn't mean it's 90 percent accurate. It means it's better than 80, right? And so it's a relative score and that's what we try to explain to our customers so they can use their judgment And then, you know, if they start getting lots of hits on 90 that was accurate. Well, let's loosen the little bit Let's go down to 80 and see if we're still getting hits there. And that's typically the use case And I'll I'll just add specific to ufl pa We also are seeing where a particular supplier may have multiple connections To what various watch list members and obviously they would boil up so specific to ufl pa Hi, Cindy dillion with dillion trade quick question. Does your platform have interface Live interface compatibility with like clients erp data on supplier lists. That's question number one and question number two is How does the continuous monitoring output work? Is it like you get an emailed report when there are flags that come up on the continuous monitoring Can you talk a little bit more about the reporting output on the continuous monitoring? Okay So Great. Thank you for the questions. The first question was around interfaces. Do we have Can we plug in via apis to external systems? Absolutely You can't sell to large enterprise clients unless you can do that So we do have that and we support that nearly every customer Uh around uh Incidences the incident monitoring capability that we do have is delivered via the platform And then the platform can also then notify can even set up just different Email notifications different groups, but it it goes to the platform and then gets distributed out based on rules that the client sets up And then the last question Is about commodity specific So a lot of the service providers over the course of the last couple of days have been talking about Supplier risk identification But how do you also incorporate commodities and the specific commodities being imported by These companies and matching that risk to the different suppliers So The final question was around another good question. Thank you. Um was around commodity level. So we we actually look at Three three broad categories that help us also align to the you know commodities and categories and products So we look at the supplier The location and the product that's part of the relationship We call that those three items the relationship so that we can then look at that product as part of that overall Connection and go what commodity is it? Is it aluminum? You know out you know out of china You know risk level goes up. Is it silicon or polysilicon? Out of a location in china risk goes up. So we do have that level of Of analysis as well as part of the platform Caroline Dale with flex for it So when you mention location as one of the risk elements Are you looking exclusively at in this context whether it is coming out of the x2ar? Or does that include potential co-location with prisons or a location in a high risk industrial park? Um So it is specific locations in the regions or zones of interest that we're looking for The direct trades coming out of but because we have these relationships. We're also looking Backwards if you will where did they source where did they source and if one of those leads to that location too? We highlight that as well. Did that answer your question? Sorry, I'm asking about high risk locations that aren't necessarily located within dxuar But that we know to be high risk either because they are co-located with the prison high risk industrial park Those sorts of indicators of a higher level of risk. Sure. We we support all sorts of high risk locations We have risk due to drought. We have risk due to political environment and Yeah, that's important for our platform doing holistic risk management Just yeah, and just to add on specific to the ufl pa Risk, um, we do make those connections as well. So We're looking for suppliers That also have you know, could be a New jersey based supplier, but also has a location in in the in the region that would cause an elevated risk So we do look for that as well Virginia Newman from miller and chevalier um You mentioned the ufl pa risk score and I think my colleague asked about the confidence level score And if you if it's a customer runs a search on your platform, and then you see a flag pop up Can they look and see what your rationale was and what sources you use to inform that? Yeah, as as jim mentioned, we do provide many different factors that that go into The confidence level as well as we there's a lot we expose so the client can actually see What what went into and made something more risky than something else There's also algorithms that we use and we explain sort of the factors that go into those So some we don't always expose some we do but it's it's all part of the platform All part of the platform they could click to like the source links if they needed to yeah And specific to ufl pa if we have a specific source Like if we put somebody on a watch list We it's not because it's not just based on the the specific us government watch list If we got it from Sheffield University or some other source we actually link back to that source So you could always go back to and know What we try to do is provide all the backup material Especially around ufl pa as we've talked about is you know having support and linkage of Of of the findings is also important. So we also provide all of that too I was also wondering if your knowledge graph has coverage in all of the high risk jurisdictions outside of china that we've seen in CBP's latest dashboard like Malaysia and vietnam Do you know like how good or like what percentage your coverage would be in those jurisdictions? Yeah, and actually it's a great great question around coverage Outside of just china what we're seeing is a lot of the connections for ufl pa that we're seeing are not just in china As we were you know and we and that's why when I was in the audience listening I was listening very intently we're seeing the same thing You know come they're moving around they're shifting And and you know going in so we're tracking global We're we're tracking the connections wherever they go. We're following those So we we're seeing a lot, you know through vietnam through other areas of the world And so we're definitely seeing that that sounds like it sounds like a lot of you are seeing that too That's it. Thank you. Thank you everybody Is this really over? Thank you so much All right, our next presentation is from f rdm or pronounced freedom, I believe So freedom is a supply chain software solution Used by global 500 companies in the united states and around the world to map Monitor and mitigate risk for forced labor and supply chains And we'll present on an innovative solution used to map monitor and mitigate risk for forced labor in supply chains So presenting for freedom is is mr. Justin Dillon Who's the founder and ceo of freedom? Who's an entrepreneur author and speaker? He founded the enterprise software company with the mission of changing the world through the power of our purchases Freedom is a business platform used by fortune 500 companies to measure mitigate the risk of forced labor supply chains And he's also the founder of and ceo of made in a free world a non-profit organization dedicated to ending forced labor Human trafficking and modern-day slavery through increased public awareness action and advocacy just all right Good to be with you all. Thanks so much cbp for um Hosting this it's uh been so fun to get to actually see So much technology so much interest in technology I've been doing this for a while and I was just uh had a chance to visit with our friends At the state department who I used to work with yesterday and got to check in with them Having worked with them for over 12 years It's just really encouraging to see the progress that's been made not just in the Government sector but in the business sector as well. So thank you for having me again. My name is Justin Dillon I founded freedom About five years ago 2018. We are a supply chain risk software platform You're going to see a lot of same same Presentation here today. So I'm I know that I stand in between you and lunch I'm very aware of that And so I'm going to make sure that I burn as few calories in your brain as possible By sharing more our story and if you want to see what we do and how we do it just come back there and garret Back there and I can can show you how to do it, but I'll run through it very quickly how we work We've been doing this for several years What's a little bit different about us is that we've built freedom alongside procurement functions. So less compliance Though that's obviously an area we're in and our customers hold those titles But we've been we've built freedom to work as a procurement and compliance team And what that means is customers have given us their spend data. I'll explain that in a second To date we're about a hundred billion dollars in spend is managed on freedom That's b2b purchases on freedom work with fortune 500s as we said in the bio industry agnostic, so we work with Universities aerospace federal contracting cbp most of our customers range Even managed services uses us to be able to monitor their supply chain oddly enough Today we have over 471,000 entities that are actively monitored that doesn't mean we don't have knowledge of those That's what our customers have loaded and are actively monitored as of today And we're able to monitor all the way down to the entity or that means the commodities level and again as I mentioned earlier freedom was started because of a partnership with With the state department, which I'll get into a second But you know, we're here to talk about the ufl pa today Obviously, we've been helping companies comply with modern slavery acts around the world for years and increasingly We're now working with companies around the german due diligence law the impending e-u law California supply chain act has been around forever and that's mostly just a due diligence law or a One in which the company mentions they're doing something I've had the privilege of being able to watch these laws all the way from california law, which obviously i'm from For years and it's been amazing to see how the maturity not just in business practices Have been adapting but also just the intelligence in which these laws are being written We see as the new laws come out. They get a little bit more Attentive and pattern matching to the way that procurement works But we do have a number of challenges still ahead of us that I want to get into One of the ways that we work with as we said we work with spend data That is our first party data And so we work with partners like ibm who's our go-to-market partner in the managed services space We're embedded inside of large erps like sap. We're even embedded inside of Banks like standard chartered and standard bank in in africa The whole point of our partnerships is so that we can live where our customers are currently operating Nobody wakes up and says you know what I would love to buy another sass platform today Literally no one and we recognize that that part of our innovation curve has to be how do we get to where our customers currently are And how do we solve problems that they may not They may not understand what the answers look like and that's something that's really important to remember here Uh anyone chasing perfection is on a fool's errand You will never be perfect your supply chain will never be perfect, but it can be better And I think that the point of this law and the point of the other laws is is that we as companies have the opportunity to get better Our mission as a company we're mission based We're here to protect people planet and profits We don't believe that any of those need to delude each other As as dr. Murphy was talking about earlier. We don't have to pick between people and planet That's that is a poverty of imagination to think that we've got to choose one over the other I mean that Transparent humane supply chains save lives so that's Who we are I want to talk for a minute about why we do this Uh supply chains isn't a space that that I never necessarily thought I'd ever be in Years ago. I got asked by the state department to build a platform called slavery footprint to help consumers Understand their own connection to slavery. This is over 10 years ago I wasn't that excited about the idea because I'm kind of a hopaholic I believe that there's good things in the world I believe that that we can create change from where we are in the world And the last thing I wanted to be associated with was the world's biggest bummer calculator called slavery footprint But we built it nonetheless 11 years ago using econometrics and statisticians and all the rest of it and building an algorithm that can determine for Consumers long before any of you had to deal with this Consumers have been looking at their own slavery footprint for over 11 years They've been going to this website that the state department and google funded and they've been learning their own footprint So in this case consumers are way ahead of you They've looked over 32 million consumers have been looking at their own supply chain for over 11 years They've loaded over 10 billion products worth trillions of dollars and they've been showing up in the marketplace going Who do we buy from this isn't necessarily a problem that gets hidden inside of the walls of compliance and trade Consumers are increasingly aware and they want to understand and while you might not be a b2c Company that's working here. You have b2c consumers working for you and on your boards So this isn't just a business and compliance issue. This is a human issue. This is a consumer issue and it's only growing The other reason that I started this company was because once I saw the consumers cared so much I felt like I needed to go understand this for myself What does the bottom of a supply chain look like and I went all over the world And I actually got to meet some of the kids in india and this is a young girl sitting on a pile of mica She gave me some This is mica This is a raw material A child laborer who works every day and they dress for work better than I do Goes into rat hole mines to pick this out To go into our cosmetics the bottom of our irons our automobiles That's what the bottom of the supply chain look like if you want to afterwards We can run over to dullis. I can book a flight and I can take in a meter That's how easy it is to meet the bottom of your supply chain But the reality is we're sitting at the top and we're sitting at the end of it So this isn't unfigurable. This is something that we can get to The greatest challenge in all of this and all of my colleagues here shared this It's data It's not unattainable My belief that if you want to create change, it's there's an algorithm for it. It's called will plus way multiplied by timing There was a lot of will to create transparency in supply chains 10 years ago, but there wasn't ways There are lots of ways here. You've seen them all We all pretty much do the same thing. We're all pulling from the same data sources Pick somebody that works well with you and go for it But the reality is most companies don't have visibility in their supply chains And when I learned that five years ago, I realized to be able to fix a social problem We have to fix a data problem less than six percent of companies have any visibility at all and 80 percent of the data As my colleagues before said is unstructured Spend data is a hot mess in companies. That's the elephant in the room here When we ask our companies for for data It comes in all shapes and forms and sizes and a lot of times We're having to match those socks to be able to start to get them any kind of clarity whatsoever There is a huge amount of work in federating data And that to me is what was the other reason that I felt like this was a good reason to start freedom How do we take the world's data start to put it together? Change lives and also change the way that we do business Now there's two ways of looking at this and ufl pa has made this very clear You can take a preventative response or you can take a reactive response Everyone here today has said Prevention is the best medicine Be on your toes not on your heels the best defense is a good offense pick your metaphor The whole thing is you had need to start and get ahead of this and not just be reactive once you find something So i'm going to go through how freedom works and how we help you be preventative and also responsive First thing we do is we do data federation. Again, that's the matching the socks That's taking the spend data helping our customers understand what they're buying who they're buying it from Just at a basic tier one level and then from there we're able to start to map all the way back to commodities We've built multiple different mapping tools one of them that we're quite proud of and you can go play with it in the back It's called product genomes essentially. It's a predictive bill of materials I heard someone talk about commodities earlier All you need to tell freedom is what you buy and we're able to tell you what commodities and raw materials And some components go into that. Why does that matter? Well five years ago when there wasn't as much of the mapping technology around trading partners companies needed to know What products am I buying from what customers have the greatest amount of risk and we were able to provide that for them And by doing so we're helping them do a job that job Is helping them to determine which suppliers need the greatest amount of oversight We too our customers have large swaths of suppliers 10,000 20,000 in some cases 70,000 suppliers that they need to manage and again from a procurement team That is a lot to look at they need to know why things are risky Where it's risky and what things need they need to pay the most attention to first So we're able to map that all the way back to commodities level and the products level We also map in trading partners. Everyone has this the way you're able to map Second third tier go backwards all the rest of it We're able to do that as well where you're able to do entity matching and get a sense of which suppliers have The most riskiest suppliers and again We use predictive and actual data meaning is there an infraction that you need to be paying attention through through adverse media Or any are on the ufl pa list We all that data is loaded into freedom and does that mapping technology just like everyone else The other way that we help our customers do this is again Think of this as a macro not just micro a lot of the ways in which we've been looking at solving problems is on a single Supplier level our customers deal in the macro meaning that they have to look at their entire supply chain And know which ones what has changed and I want to speak a minute about our customers You know, I don't have a data science background. I just have Um, I just love to make things that make a difference and and give those to people And I know that doesn't sound like much of a pedigree, but it's working for me What I love about our customers is they tell us what they need And I think that is so important. We take a jobs theory approach to innovation meaning I can build you anything you want Are you going to use it? What are you going to do with it? What's the problem? It's going to solve some of that Resonance and that 360 view and the intellectual honesty of knowing What problem a product is going to solve is so important in the innovation curve You need to understand what someone's going to do with it And if they're going to use that and that's how we've built every single Feature in freedom and continue to build out features is understanding what jobs are we taking off of our customers desks Which include alerts and supplier engagement as well Now response is also important our customers many of them have to report yearly meaning that UF LPAs is something they have to deal with but they also have to deal with the uk modern slavery act and the australia act and whatever Trade enforcement they have to do Across mexico us and canada so they have multiple different jobs that they have to do so reporting becomes really really important What have they done again? These reports are What have you done over the last year? What are you planning to do this year? And so many of our customers come to us and go. What's the best practice and the answer is We're still figuring it out Every company's still figuring it out and the government is figuring out But the cost of doing nothing Continues to go up globally whether it's whether it's here at the uf lpa or the german act The cost of doing nothing goes up So our customers need to be able to have a repository of what they've done year over year in germany You have to keep track of seven years of activity risk goes up risk goes down Activity taken remediation all of that needs to be locked So we're given our customers a drawer with which they can track all of their activity and give them the ability to report And quite frankly what's very important to us is create impact We're not here just to point at problems. We're here to make companies operate better and we're here to make the world Operate better so impact is a big word for us. And if you're not into impact, we're definitely not the provider for you All of our customers get speed to impact The reality is most customers or most companies if they're looking at this are looking at it from a manual process So the whole point of this is having a very light load a very light lift to bring spend data in And within two months you're already up and running and tracking risk inside of your supply chain Uh where we see ourselves going is the the other elephant in the room now, there's two elephants spend data and another one You need your suppliers to provide you with information and just sending them a questionnaire Speaking as a supplier myself Receiving questionnaires is not self motivating. Why? Because we already have the contract. Why do I need to ask? Answer more questions Suppliers need incentives to provide more information And I think that is the next code to crack in the work that we are all trying to do Is how do we build a network where suppliers are not just doing because they have to but because it's good for their business Transparency needs to become a value add not a cost center for companies That's the only way we're going to start to trace back at scale One of our like I said before we follow our customers. We follow them into Uh what they do and one of the customers that has just inspired us the most is a company called Oshkosh. They make big Uh military vehicles fire engines lifts. Uh, they're the ones when your mail starts to show up in an electric vehicle Think Oshkosh. They're the ones that are that are building that amazing company out of wisconsin Amazing individual named Alec. Uh, who's watching hey alec. Um, he couldn't be here today with me We love following their innovation curve and one of the things that we've seen what Oshkosh has done with our technology Is start to take it and putting into the procurement process We didn't even know they did this but they took our tech put it into the procure to pay process So that as suppliers are come get onboarded they go through the the vetting process before they ever become a supplier We think that's amazing And we think that our customers actually have the best ideas out there because they're the ones that are doing the jobs So we're very appreciative of the way that they operate and what we can solve for them Lastly, let's not forget that history, uh, doesn't repeat itself But it does rhyme. We've been here before We've been here before King Leopold in congo Uh extracting the the most precious commodity of its day not mica. It was rubber 10 million people's lives Uh ruined and destroyed We know what the history books say and we know that we can as human beings We have to operate better and just because we live in the 21st century does not give us Any preference or any superiority over what has happened before we're capable of this We're also capable of using our collective will our collective buying power And our collective intelligence to be able to get rid of this and solve this for good Transparency does save lives and it can save your business. Thanks for listening any questions I was always the kid in the back of the room raising her hand. I can't help it. Um How would you recommend companies begin cleaning up their supplier data their product data in order to better integrate A solution like yours into their supply chain That's a great question. Uh, first of all, um Uh realize that you're in the majority the 95 percent majority of companies that have data that needs to be cleaned up So it is a is a process as alex said for alex always says from um, uh from ashkosh It is a journey right you are on a journey and you're not going to be perfect day one We don't need very uh detailed data to be able to get started Supplier names is how we get started what you're buying Uh, how much you're spending which is just a filtering tool but also really helpful Uh, the industry that you're in you'd be amazed how much spend data Companies don't even know what the industry and tying it into a nakescode Those are all really really important data points that whether a company has that or not We can we have a hydration process or we can hydrate all that data and pull that information in Once that information comes in just those five data points We're able to start mapping all the way back to the nth tier So it's not that hard, but like my colleague said before sometimes companies have you know Dozens of erp systems that spread out So we try to tell our customers just get started with what's important 65 of our customers add more data every year So we don't get all of their data all at once So it is a process and you can improve on it over time One of the scores that we track inside of freedom that we've created is a transparency score That transparency score is how much do you know has has the data that's been federated onto freedom has it increased Did we add it? Did you add it? Did your suppliers add it? That gives you a bigger as our friends say graph on your supply chain your graph should always be growing It should always be getting bigger and so just putting your spend out up first is just the first step Makes sense Awesome. We're good, right? Okay. Thanks everyone All right. Well, it is definitely a privilege and honor to host you in our home here at the ronald reagan building As you may have noticed that we are the premier destination for every fifth grade class that comes into washington dc for a field trip So I wish you all the best luck as you head into the walls of the food court for lunch So so we're going to take um, we're going to take some lunch Please we'll start back up at one o'clock I look forward to i'm sure that everyone will have some more productive discussions network during the lunch So we'll see you back here at one o'clock. We'll go ahead and get started here Hope everyone had a great lunch I'm pretty sure and uh, you know, maybe in 20 or 30 minutes. We may see some planking kids up here or something like that So we just exercise kind of what I do with my own fifth grader I just try to talk louder and over him, you know, which comes at great success. So Um, so all right. So the first step that we have that we'll be presenting this afternoon is from Um, helixa the company helixa which provides innovative solutions to physically mark trace and authentic authenticate products from producers to retail To retail creating transparency along the entire supply chain Now presenting for helixa is dr. Getty minas micutes Who is the cto and co-founder of helixa? Getty minas is one of the inventors of the helixa solution He has extensive experience in project management IP generation and executing sustainability strategies He's a member of the expert panel of the united nations center for trade facilitation and electronic business He works on projects related to supply chain transparency and he's a frequent speaker at international events Focused on creating transparent supply chains and supporting new legislation Getty minas Right. So good afternoon everyone. My name is getty minas and I'm representing helixa helixa is a swiss company that has Developed and is now commercializing a solution to mark raw materials and trace them from the supply chain up to finish products And even beyond using dna based markers So first of all, um, why do we need traceability at all? Let me see if I can change the slides. Yeah so Irrespective of the industry that you look at here, we show the example of textiles of the denim Irrespective of the industry that majority of the Environmental impact as well as the social impact is happening very much upstream in the supply chain So it's happening not with your tier one suppliers But usually with tier two three four suppliers And therefore from a brand's perspective or from a retailer's perspective it's not enough to Only understand your tier one suppliers as the speakers discussed this morning We actually need to go much further To be able to address the risks related to the forest labor to address the risks related to environmental sustainability And also to address even the quality risks to the very basic extent However, this is by far not easy. That's why we are all here and to To illustrate how difficult that is I can give you a bit of stats. So actually 60 percent of the claims On the apparel products and retail in europe and the us cannot be backed up by any data So there are claims on the products, but they cannot be backed up by the data And to be able to take control of your supply chain and to manage those risks and to manage the Liabilities that you have you actually needs traceability Now if you think about the most common approaches to traceability, there is the Chain of custody systems that can be paper based on nowadays They're becoming more and more digital and they are based on either internal ERP databases of the companies They are based on standards and the associated transaction certificates And they are also very often based on the nowadays new technologies such as blockchain However, these solutions are only as good as the data that you put into them So imagine you have a supply chain where you Document every supply chain step, but the documentation is not connected to the product itself So if one of your suppliers exchanges their product with a cheaper copy with a Non-original product your digital interface would still show that you have all the supply chain documentation yet the physical product is not what you expect and to Manage this challenge you need to connect this digital information to the product itself And that's where we at headache succumb into play So what we do is we have developed a way to mark textile products with a unique DNA code And we use DNA because just like each of you has a unique DNA sequence We can chemically create as many unique DNA fingerprints as you want And then use them to mark the products now the DNA on its own is not really stable So what we do is we put DNA into these tiny capsules that protect the DNA from harsh chemical stress Thermal stress as well as mechanical stress So this allows us to mark raw materials and that DNA can be detected across the whole supply chain up to the finished products We do work in a few industries. So we started working with our precious minerals where we mark Diamonds emeralds pearls. We also work on precious metals such as gold silver and some others and The recently we have been seeing a lot of Demand for traceability in the textile supply chains on one hand because it's quite Those are quite complicated supply chains. And then on the other hand, there is also a lot of regulation coming into the apparel and footwear sector And then finally looking long term. We are also looking into the traceability of food We just had the approvals for headaches that to be used in food products So we believe that that's also a market that's important to cover where we would be able to prove the provenance of the coffee that you had this morning Now going into a bit more detail of how this actually works So we designed unique DNA codes and then these DNA codes are applied as early as possible in the supply chain So in the case of textiles, we started with a fiber where the DNA is sprayed on the fiber and then At any later point throughout the supply chain you can analyze the Yarn you can analyze the fabric you can analyze the finished garment and detect the DNA And this DNA allows you to prove claims related not only to the origin But also to sustainability standards to specific sustainability conditions The quality of the material recycling status and so on And we chose to use DNA first because it allows us to give a barcode to the product So it allows us to give identity to the product which means that the information is traveling with the product itself So unlike digital traceability solutions If you exchange the product you would not detect the DNA and that's why you would be able to prove If somebody in your supply chain is actually counterfeiting the products On top of that we apply DNA in the very beginning of the supply chain and because we put it into these small capsules It enables the DNA to survive all the transformations. So we start with the fiber We end up with the finished garment and still if you would analyze my shirt It would be able to detect the DNA that was applied to the fiber somewhere in pakistan So we have traceability for how the whole supply chain yet the DNA that we use is something that you eat every day So it's something completely safe and it's approved to be used in organic textiles It's approved to be used in food products and so on And finally the DNA gives us the versatility that you need for supply chain traceability So we can generate as many unique DNA fingerprints to give a unique identity to A specific supplier a specific product raw material or even a specific batch And this gives us quite a bit of flexibility Now going into a bit more technical details of how this actually works We apply a unique DNA code as early as possible in the supply chain. So usually we start in Just after the Fiber is produced and it's somewhat automated the next steps and at that point we spray A water solution containing DNA markers on the fiber and from that point on the fiber is marked So the DNA evaporates where the water evaporates whereas DNA sticks to the fiber And from that point on you can trace the fiber at any point throughout the production Then to extract the DNA we do a PCR test. So first we flush the liquid through Textile garment or intermediate product. We extract the DNA We load it into a PCR machine and we detect a specific DNA Now the key advantage of this technology is that it works as a key and lock mechanism which means that You only detect the DNA that you are looking for just like with COVID If you are analyzing for COVID you detect the specific COVID DNA and the same way you detect Only the DNA that you are looking for which increases the security of the system So people cannot simply sequence the DNA and detect what is inside Now once the DNA is analyzed we issue the certificate of analysis that can be shared With our customers and they can share with the regulators with the Customs and border protection and so on and in some cases this data is shared directly with them In some other cases it's uploaded to external solution providers ERP systems blockchain systems and so on And then some of our customers actually like to share this data with the end consumers So in those cases we also offer the QR codes that lead to designated landing pages where you can Actually see the whole product history and based on that In those pages you also have all the data to back up this claim So it's not a random landing page But it has all the supply chain information where the DNA has been marked and at which stages it has been tested Now this technology has been adopted by more than 40 different customers across textile supply chains and also a number of Precious mineral supply chains and we do work with a number of leading european and us Brands and retailers as well as manufacturers all across asia south america and africa And to these customers we do help to achieve one of the three goals First of all, we give them the complete supply chain visibility Really starting from the beginning of the supply chain up to the finished product And that allows them to make claims related to the origin of the product So let's say whether the cotton that you are sourcing is coming from pakistan and it's not from shinjan province It allows you to prove claims Connected to the sustainability of the product Let's say whether you are using organic cotton or not whether you are using recycled fibers and so on And it allows you to prove a quality standards Let's say if the cashmere that you are using has been blended with cheaper fibers such as sheep wool or even synthetic fibers Second day the dna allows our customers to communicate their supply chain story this way increasing the Intimacy with the end consumer and building the brand value This has been quite important with some of our customers And we actually do have data to show that it adds value to the product and increases the sales of that product and finally with the increasing increasing the strict supply chain regulation And i'm not talking only of ufl ppa. There are a lot of regulations coming into place in various geographies Especially strong in europe We enable our customers to Prove the claims that they are making on the products to avoid the anti-greenwashing Registration to apply to them and we allow them to prove supply chain due to the chance requirements Now to finish off i would like to show one use case which goes even beyond The linear supply chain traceability starting from the fiber. We do actually work on Recycling more and more because recently there has been more and more demand for Proving of recycling of the products and whenever you see this enormous growth In specific fiber demand, you know that there will be parties in the supply chain that will actually try to Cheat the system and will try to provide you with the fibers that are not necessarily recycled or recycled from different sources and so on So what we did in this case is we partnered with one of the european retailers To mark the post consumer ways that they are collecting and that's what a lot of companies are trying to do now so they set up the systems to Recycle their products. That's also coming into law in many jurisdictions so they collect the products then they ship it to A production country somewhere on the other side of the world And then they can only hope that six years six months later or maybe one year later They receive the products that are actually are made from This post consumer ways that they collected and in this case we actually marked the post consumer waste It was then shredded. It was Made into the new fiber Blended with a virgin fiber made into yarns fabric spinach garments and then in the end The retailer receives those New garments we do a DNA test and we are able to verify Is a trader coming from that specific post consumer waste or not? So this allows you to have not only Claims on origin of the fiber, but also allows you to prove the recycling recycling status And thus you can make the sustainability claim on the product So this gives our customers assurance to have this closed loop recycling system verified through the NA traceability And with this I would like to Finish and I hope I gave you some ideas of how technology like that can be utilized Not only for the forced labor issues, but also to comply with increasing the strict regulation on Supply chain due diligence on anti-greenwashing and so on Thank you very much Any questions? Good to see you. I'm jeff wheeler the director of the global trace protocol project We very much appreciate the work that helix has been doing for us on the cotton pilot in Pakistan and it might be interesting to hear a little bit of your reflections on on how The this iterative process took place of problem solving the importance of training Identifying some of the issues and then having helix to be able to help us work through them Right so roughly I would say roughly in a third of our supply chains Actually, we do detect that at some point throughout the traceability project We lose the identity of DNA and that gives us immediately the idea that at those points the material has been mixed or exchanged and there there is Quite a bit of need for education for the supply chain parties because today's supply chains operate very much on the mass balance principle Which means that you don't have to retain identity preservation from the supply chain And that's where we see that the biggest challenge is where we really need to Educate all the supply chain parties that look at this product is traceable Using physical traceability and this means that at every point of the supply chain You have to retain this identity preservation and you cannot Substitute the product by identical other product because in such cases traceability wouldn't work So I think this is one of the areas where we do have to do A lot of education work and that's where where we need to still improve and where we need to Work with the supply chains closer Thank you for your presentation. Um, can you speak a little bit about how often This type of analysis would be conducted for a customer of yours and the average cost I don't know if you want to get into that or not, but you know, it just sounds very In-depth and DNA and it could be expensive. Can you just speak a little bit to that? All right, so the amount of testing that we do depends very much on how the supply chain is set up And how much confidence we build in that supply chain So in the very initial phases on the new supply chain, what we do is we do test material at every single step of the supply chain So they say if you mark the fiber, we tested at the yarn stage. We tested at the fabric stage We tested at the finished garment stage To build a trust that the system works indeed the way that it is supposed to be Because usually our customers have mapped the supply chain So they do have an idea how it should work But they are never 100% sure and in those cases we do test it in the beginning really at every single step However, over time as we build the confidence and as our customers build their confidence They say look we can minimize some of these steps of the testing and this way make the Whole operation leaner and really focus on the riskiest parts of the supply chain And usually our customers are quite good at identifying where they suspect some unusual activity or where they have the lack of transparency Then talking about the cost that's very much dependent on the scale That's dependent on how complex the supply chain is And then you have to think of the cost that can be offset at the retail side With the savings that you you gain that as I indicated by being able to Defend the claims that you make in front of the regulators to be able to communicate the added value to the end consumers To make it personal to the end consumers if you are buying a cashmere sweater It's very nice to see the goats and the whole supply chain journey from which the cashmere has been actually made And that also adds value to the customers Now to give you a rough indication of how much technology is like headaches or cost We are talking about a few cents per garment. So for the end product, that sounds very affordable Now if you are upstream in the supply chain, if you are a manufacturer If you are a novative manufacturer who wants to implement this Then the cost at that stage can be quite prohibitive So we really have to be able to distribute those costs across the supply chain Any other questions? Okay, then thank you. All right next we have applied dna sciences So applied dna sciences is an innovative dna supply chain traceability solution for forced labor compliance They're using dna tagging dna genotyping and isotope testing for forced labor compliance presenting for applied dna sciences Mr. Jim Hayward is the chairman president and ceo of applied dna sciences Dr. Hayward Has over 20 years of experience in biotechnology pharmaceutical life sciences and consumer product industries Dr. Hayward is actively involved in the global effort to ensure the authenticity Origin of products such as cotton and the protection of global supply chains from counterfeiting and diversion Well, first of all, I'd like to thank cbp for the technical expo and for inviting us. I'm jim hayward I'm a molecular biologist And CEO of applied dna sciences and as our name implies We are focused on nucleic acids And their utility in therapeutics in diagnostics and in supply chains We operate under iso 17 0 25, which is the forensic standard And we're pleased to present our certainty traceability solutions for secure cotton supply chains Certainty is a multiplexed platform that relies upon the forensic strength of two forms of dna The genomics of endogenous cotton dna Remember, of course that every fiber of cotton is a cell It has a nucleus a mitochondria chloroplast is loaded with dna itself And we overlay with that with the security of unique molecular attacks and these two Platforms in concert with the relative abundance of naturally occurring isotopes Form the three legs of our certainty supply chain platform Now we are a public u.s. Company With our labs and manufacturing in new york since 2009 Applied dna has really been a pioneer In cotton traceability using molecular tags and the genomics of endogenous cotton dna Examining how to differentiate dna for cotton origin and for cotton varietals And now we're using natural isotopes to identify origin as well We also provide traceability for other materials such as viscose polyester leather And we have done the same for military microchips For more than nine years running automotive parts o-rings inks including ink jets Silicone gaskets and many other materials We work with lots of federal agencies and with police departments all over the world To date our evidence has been used to prosecute over 170 international criminal cases With more with a 100 percent conviction rate in all 170 cases and sentences totaling over 500 years Over 140,000 unique dna tags have been designed and manufactured At scale in our u.s. Facility Now cbp as mentioned on multiple occasions you need to know your supply chain We of course agree And have developed what we call the certainty baseline as a framework to provide a systematic way to authenticate fiber yarn Greige Died fabric all the way to finish product We firmly believe that the strongest supply chains have testing continuity Between each of the nodes in the supply chain. It's more work But it's worth it now using our certainty Baseline as a framework. We provide an integrated multiplex content traceability system that consists of the stable isotope ratio testing for cotton origin genotyping testing of the endogenous cotton for cotton content and signature T dna tagant That provides a fully secure traceable supply chain together these three pillars provide the industry with a complete and comprehensive Tracking system for cotton as well as other textiles The first technical pillar relates to stable isotope ratio testing for cotton origin verification Now stable isotopes Are isotopes of the same element That do not appear to undergo radioactive decay They're usually the light elements And their ratios because they don't decay remain constant For example the ratio of oxygen 18 to oxygen 16 or carbon 13 to carbon 12 Or deuterium to hydrogen Those ratios are very stable Now cotton is grown In many places around the world and the isotopic ratios of those elements around the world were really established thanks to the big bang And they change only slowly So that you can use the ratio of those isotopes to track the origin if done with care Now for more than 10 years Applied dna has developed and updated a global cotton reference library From many commercial growing areas Aided in part By a usda credo Now this three-dimensional Scatogram With axes of the isotopic ratios for those three elements shows how cotton reference fibers form Singular regions that aggregate Enabling the identification of the geographic origin of an unknown sample You can see how different regions within the us compare to regions such as australia india and egypt But these are for 100% cotton fibers What happens when you blend a cotton fiber With another Fiber say recycled pt Or if you have a cotton fiber That has been extensively treated with finishes enough to change the mass DNA tagged Cotton fiber in west texas in order to carefully track these bells Before tagging we genotyped The endogenous dna to ensure that the gin feedstock was exactly as they claimed We prepared 60% cotton 40% recycled pet As gray yarn gray fabric and finish fabric made from that tag cotton Now at first glance These samples all appear to look like cotton from china The isotopic ratio the recycled pet was different enough from the west texas cotton to overlay the samples on the position Within the scatogram that would normally represent chinese cotton Therefore if you don't Prepare your samples carefully if you don't know the identity of what's in your fiber It's possible to have false positives using isotopic analysis You need to be able to subtract the contribution to the isotopic ratios Made by blended components or fabric finishes By analyzing the isotopic ratio of the pure recycled pet And subtracting that Proportionately from the blended fiber you can see that the gray yarn gray fabric and finish fabric All moved to be consistent with west texas fiber In textiles, there are many variables that can impact the overall isotopic profile such as bleaches fire retardant coatings blended fibers such as with viscose polyester and others Therefore the potential of a false positive is always there if you don't identify the cotton components Properly in the very first place But the key point here is that The dna tagged fiber enables us to validate the authentic cotton and also prevent a blending artifact With non-tag materials that might promote false positives Which brings us back to the true origin of cotton? You have to know where your cotton is sourced from we have three tools that contribute to that isotopic abundance genotyping Where we rely upon my new differences in the endogenous dna of cotton fibers that correspond to different species Varietals and geographic origins and we use dna tagging Since 2012 applied dna has tag tested and tracked from the source at the gin to yarn Fabric and finished goods over 400 million pounds of american fiber cotton fiber Our system has been well tested and withstood the challenge Without the tagging there can be doubt and uncertainty Because there are infinite ways to blend cotton die and bleaches Our system is simple Once manufactured at scale a unique dna tag is applied onto the fiber itself Typically at the gin of the spinner Before the tagging we use our genotyping and isotopic testing to verify the feed stack Using genotyping we have developed and patented assays to discriminate between the two dominant cotton species And for some of the varietals within a species So for example, we can determine whether cotton is barbadency or hosudum or within barbadency whether it's egyptian or american The tag can be specific to the gin or to the spinner And once tagged you can verify it in raw materials finished products and you can also use the tag in packaging The assay for the tag is a simple PCR test that can be done in the lab or on site in less than an hour So here's how it works Traceable fibers are tagged using our dna transfer system Each dna tag bail is associated with a bail id and issued a certificate Portable PCR units the colorful ones you see in the bottom there Can be used to test at each stage of the supply chain from the fiber all the way to finished goods And these portable units are about the size of a coffee can Way about a pound And they can run from 16 to 32 Samples every 40 minutes and one day you could easily test 300 samples at a cost of less than $15 per sample it saves time in production And testing time as well So all of that data Can be tracked in our secure cloud our certainty portal Which complements other digital and blockchain methods Now we have the cotton library The advances in next generation sequencing and in bioinformatics That can identify specific dna Cotton types and their origin Mutations take place frequently in the complex cotton genome Which in some ways is more complicated than our own Laboratories across the world have identified nearly 50,000 50,000 Single nucleotide polymorphs. That's a single change of one letter in the genome And a SNP is at a single site With only one letter change SNPs are responsible for many human diseases All 50,000 SNPs Are mutations that occur randomly Or in hotspots at known locations in the cotton genome It is likely That many of these mutations can be used to characterize the origin of cotton Within a geographic gene pool much like Darwin's finches And as I show we'll show you we've done for Giza and it provides A means to uniquely identify The dna from Xinjiang cotton So the benefits of dna tagging and genomic testing are you can be accountable for your own cotton And supply chain it's faster more affordable and scalable It's a portable forensic testing That can reduce lead times and the potential for false positives Now becomes vanishingly small This is what I referred to a moment ago Once mapped as we have done here genetic changes Become biomarkers that can be used to identify specific cotton varietals Here's an example of how dna testing has already been done For egyptian Giza 94 Once the change has been mapped as shown in this electro faragram Simple pcr assays can be designed that can be utilized for testing anywhere in the world Using next generation sequencing and related methods We can genotype cotton dna from different regions of the world providing a faster And more precise way To authenticate cotton So why are we all here today? We want to know that there is no Xinjiang cotton in our samples And we also want to get cotton That we know we can trust We've developed the systems the tests to identify global cotton And we're working on developing a diagnostic genome Genomic dna test for Xinjiang cotton That would significantly help in resolving potential false positives And also a means to test global cotton faster and more effectively And with me today in the audience are Andrew and Mei Lin You want to raise your hands And I'll be leaving in an hour or so But feel free to continue the dialogue with Mei Lin and Andrew And with that I'd be happy to take any questions Well listen, thank you very much All right, our next presenter is from Covisis who will be presenting on a revolutionary Tagless track and trace solution for item And item and package level Covert traceability to meet regulatory requirements and the presenter for Covisis Is Dr. Nuresh Menon Who is the CEO of Covisis He has over 30 years of industrial research development and product launch experience He's passionate about addressing issues that impact consumer confidence in areas such as e-commerce and where regulations require item level traceability Such as aerospace medical and automotive He received his phd in physics from Purdue With an emphasis in sensor fabrication Instrumentation and novel data analytic methods His early career was spent at Corning Incorporated and with Northrop Grumman Mission systems Good afternoon I'm Nuresh Menon the CEO and founder of Covisis So Covisis stands for the co being shared and vice is for vision Really excited to be here We have not done any particular programs or projects directly related to CBP, so it's a real honor to be here Most of our work has been in supply chain traceability for other sectors Where there are higher regulatory barriers for requiring product level traceability So what i'm going to talk about I mean, this is a great Session to be in because we have two other speakers who have talked about biologically inspired traceability We're going to talk about another way of using biologically inspired traceability using nature to Figure out where your parts come from There's a clicker here. I'm told I'm sorry. I think I seem to be the only one with an issue Thank you so much Sorry about that. It's kind of embarrassing to be a video alum and not being able to use a clicker So, you know, we've had two days of sessions of very informative and sort of passionate issues about false labor So I put myself in the shoes of CBP the host of this event and said what is their big problem It's an overwhelming problem How do you know and how do you rapidly identify who the bad actors are? Because we talked about supply chain. There are many many tiers as you go deeper into the layer of the supply chain and and there's Over three and a half trillion dollars worth of goods coming to the country And how do we make sure who to trust? Because every supply chain is commingled and there are people with far less resources And require far as resources to commingle the supply chain and create confusion and cost and at the end This is all cost that's transferred to the end user The intermediaries along the chain and we as consumers have to pay for it. And how do we find a way to solve this problem? So So we developed what is called as a virtual tag So today's solutions for traceability I mean we talked there've been many sessions and talks about data How we want to trust the data of our supply chain But at the end to trust the data as a previous speaker spoke You need to a way of physically associating your data with the article itself Now this is not new historically. We all have bar codes qr codes direct part marking Even taggons such as the dna tag and sessions that we talked about But they're all physically attaching a label to your part This is possible in many cases But then there are many many many components and parts when either the article is incredibly small Or change applying a tag changes the performance of the part Or applying the tag requires you to re-qualify the component itself Then you become come to a case many cases where millions of parts cannot be tagged So if you cannot physically tag it and if you don't have a way to access the tag, we need another solution Uh, so a solution is needed that is immutably linking a component to its data And what we've developed is called a virtual tag Now a virtual tag is not something, you know, uh Hand wavy or blockchain what it actually is is we it's a bio inspired way of looking at a as an article and Create extracting is fingerprint So we take an image of the part and from that part we take the surface texture, which is at the micron scale And is well published that these textures are incredibly unique Even if you move around within the same article itself and using that texture We kind of take that create a fingerprint which is immutably linked to the part itself I'm going to see if there's a if the video can be queued So using that photograph and the surface texture we create two components One is a traceability fingerprint. The other is classification So we can actually tell where the parts made what kind of processes were made if they're common features And then actually serialized and if needed individually serialize every part to dual factor authentication You have a serialized number and then we verify it with our virtual tag And it's unique uh incredibly unique we have done And I'll get into the more details of what is the smallest size and speed In a second, so just as a recap So it is an imaging technology It takes us less than two seconds one and a half seconds to take an image And from that at the edge extract the surface texture Create the fingerprint and then link it to it's either an enrollment phase or at a verification phase It's a portable camera system. We have built it into robotic systems for mass production At at inline processing it can be done at the Field of use it can be used in statistical sampling of your of your lot We do mostly rigid components. We don't do cotton And other textiles directly, but we'll do the package which it's It's immutable It's part of the system itself and it's covered you never know where we have put the v tag Only we as the authors of the of the technology And the sponsors will tell you where the v tag is and we don't change the package the manufacturing or processing Of the of the system at all. It's all image based The way we work with our Customers and supply chains is we create tokens. So these are Tokens are a few kilobytes in size and we link the data from one source from one erp system to another erp system Just like you would do with a barcode So what are operational capabilities? We have been in business for quite a few years We were all funded by the department of defense And we develop a tech stack using the defense applications. We are we've done complex parts such as aircraft engine, which are high temperature They cannot put a physical tag on them. They're required to be traceable We work with the u.s. Air force. We work with defense Microtronics agency microtronics components. We trace it from the wafer to the die to the package and beyond We work with automotive companies, which you see down there are Airbag initiators we trace it by the pin, which is half a millimeter in diameter We do for medical devices. We work on implantable screws. So the idea is that it's incredibly Fast for inline use and is designed to be Minimal added cost to your operations because we have a machine vision camera, which is bolt-on to your process flow Well, that's our system It's a pretty straightforward of the camera system that we use Similar to something you would buy from cognacs or other machine vision camera systems our intellectual properties how we extract the image and How we take the surface texture out of it and it can be configured for multiple application spaces So this is a quick case study. I wanted to share Um, you know, one of the challenges what we found in the industries that we work in is compliance is good Is important. It's needed to protect lives, but there's also cost As many speakers have also alluded to it So this is a case study we did funded by the missile defense agency The regulations require that microtronics that go into our weapons systems are fully traced Um, and what we did was we worked with authorized distributors as well as An integrator such as Boeing and how a microtronic component from the distributor to Boeing can be immutably traced Many many hundreds of parts the whole po systems were created for doing the traceability data transfer and showing the assurance And this is very important because from that we realized Which was a surprise our whole goal was to show that you know, we can have an immutable traceability link But we started to show that we can actually eliminate costs because a lot of at every time A component is handed off from one distributor to the other. There's testing costs. There's validity costs Evaluation costs and those just add up and within within a year We were able to show savings to a quarter of a million dollars and a very small pilot program Which makes it cost effective if for the system itself because you're eliminating duplicative costs And I think that's very important for those audience to realize that if you adopt the right traceability solution and the data solutions You're actually cost neutral to actually saving costs because these regulations are not going to go away We require we're required to comply and if you comply if you comply the right way You can actually save costs So how do we address a cbp like problem? So we've not done anything For the cbp. So this is a hypothetical case study The example would be You have an authorized source an authorized distributor that you have Qualified as your distributor or a manufacturer in a source and you can prevent any commingling In any gray market product introduction into that secure supply chain at the end It is the manufacturer or the Purchasers responsibility to establish a secure supply chain But you want to make sure that it's not defeated by gray market products and that's what we can do in a very cost effective way We have done tamper resistant tags Which is you can put your own tag and we will v tag that label and make sure that it hasn't been tampered with We will do things like part level traceability And finally as I mentioned to you earlier We've seen time and time again that as you increase trust in your supply chain You actually systematically reduce cost. You're talking about less testing, but you're also talking about Suppliers that we work with are motivated to do traceability because you can actually do faster payments I mean, they're very excited to be able to pay it faster. It's not stuck somewhere in customs It's not stuck somewhere in supply chain. Hey We are giving you an immutable Way of guaranteeing that the product that you have is what you what you said You're going to ship and that data travels to the customer instantaneously So how can we help you? Thank you. Good afternoon. Very interesting. Thank you Brenda Smith with expeditors. You mentioned Part level tag Can you do at the unit level or would the picture look the same? Could you give an example of what you mean by unit level? So if I have a palette of something And I want to know Or I have two palettes of the same good Both produced I know what the fingerprint is on the legitimate, but let's say the other palette is gray market came from the same factory Same production techniques, but it was it's not authentic. It wasn't licensed. Can I tell the difference? Yes, so we don't we are designed to wherever we can put an image wherever you have your trusted Label so for example if you take a palette and you seal it and you put a label on it We can verify that label is what your trusted source applied And even if it's so for example V tags are applicable on paper based or any other Physical label you you know like a tamper resistance seal if you break it and if you defeat it We know that that tamper seal has been broken because it's is one of a kind So the so you have to combine the label with the the product itself Yes, so so you have to have a trusted source Where you know the provenance of your product and once you have that trusted source We can do other part or palette or wherever you put your trusted seal. Okay. Thank you Sure. Thank you. Hi. Um, that was a really interesting presentation. Thank you for that My name is Virginia. I I'm wondering about it sounds like this is mostly applicable to finished goods You mentioned that there's some part level traceability I'm wondering if you have any clients or if you think it could be applicable To if you imported a finished good, but there was one kind of sub component that was of concern Has anyone applied it in that respect to try to tag that sub component and then No for us. It's any rigid article. So for example We could v tag the buttons on your on your jacket or zippers. So anything that's a physical rigid component That's where we work best So anything that's that retains and as long as the surface does not get abraded or removed We can assure our v tag survives Was that helpful very helpful. Thank you Good Thank you. All right. Well, we'll um, we'll take a break And then we'll get into our next round of industry presentations. So Why don't we return back here at uh, 215? All right. I'd like to welcome everyone back from the break So we're in the home stretch. So we've got our last group of Last but definitely not least last group of presentations Uh, and we will start off with uh, trust trace who is Presenting on a AI based solution for Uighur for Saber prevention act trade compliance so Pauline miss Pauline god who is The head of partnerships and a product manager for ufl pa has over 10 years of experience and sustainability management in the apparel industry Pauline holds an academic background in economics and environmental science And she's based in stock home where she's been working at at the trust trace headquarters for the past Past five years So with that, I'd like to welcome Pauline Thank you so much My name is Pauline Um, I'm here to present the trust trace ufl pay solution And the trust trace i'm the product owner of the ufl pay solution as well as manage the partnership ecosystem Which over the days, we heard a lot about partnerships a lot about Collaboration which makes me very happy because there is no one Silver bullet solution to to tackle this So Trust trace. We're also a SAS platform. We've heard that a couple of times today We work with the parallel industry for supply chain traceability and transparency for product and material traceability and compliance We're based in stock home in sweden and we have offices today in india where we have our technical headquarters in the u.s. And in france Now we're around 120 people and run some of the largest traceability programs in the world Monthly we follow around two and a half million transactions of material movements today And we have about 45 different customers And 8 000 to 10 000 suppliers on boarded on the platform today we populated a lot of more suppliers data, but on boarded on the platform We're trusted by some of the leading enterprise apparel brands in industry today and have a very agile and connected Team working to solve the different challenges that the apparel brand phase today We're also very connected with the different Players in the apparel industry and on the point of being connected. This is just quickly. I want to mention some of the partnerships and the memberships we have today at trustrace This is key to accelerating sustainable change in the industry today. We need to partner And we have also just recently partnered with caron. We're proud for that. This means that our customers can Leverage the current list of restricted entities directly on the trustrace platform And they will of course bring more confidence to the data that is connected or collected in our platform Last year we also launched two different resources that have been very well received in the industry today We have the traceability playbook and these are open source. You can download them on our websites So the traceability playbook is a guide on traceability for apparel industry It was co-authored with some of the leading industry players such as fashion revolution and fashion for good And then we also have the knowledge hub which is a curated summary of some of the traceability Insights the trends the laws and regulations that are affected the industry So about the ufo solution that we have today It's a set of features that consist of three different components. So first of all, we have the supply chain mapping Here brands can discover and declare the supply chain and it's to help them to make the decisions before placing a purchase order So it's this proactive approach that we have heard sometimes these days We have evidence collection and submission This is after the goods have been Are ready for shipment. So it's too sure that the shipments would comply. For example with the ufo pa And from an approach standpoint, you should always have this data already So all of this data should be collected proactively if you don't do that It's it takes some time. It will not most probably not be ready in 30 days But it's of course approach that we recommend and then we have dashboard and reports and all these things for actionable insights in In real time and these three components together forms a very powerful approach for both risk detection as well as risk mitigation So as I said, we're a platform we help brand work across the supply chain and We helped them to expand the networks and insight continuously because this is ongoing continuous work Um as the supply chain information differs across product. This is also key There's not one sourcing strategy that all brands use it will differ if it's a t-shirt if it's a jacket or depending There will be several sourcing strategies So we need to um to have solutions and offer solutions for all these different sourcing strategies So here we see a combination of product insights into the supply chain mapped together with the data confidence level So this is an overview and I will delve into the different details of these different steps of the stairs in uh in the summary So starting from zero, we have the bottom of the stairs the um starting from zero we We we see this step when brands know little or almost nothing about the supply chain of a specific product that they are looking to investigate So the starting point then could be to use global average trade data However, as expected the confidence level when you use these kind of data sets could be quite low Because it represents a possibility of how the supply chain mapping looks like But it's not really validated on a product level or a lot level traceability So instead on level one, we do supply chain mapping with declarations And the brand stands sourcing strategies could be cut matrix or using traders for example so they would ask these suppliers to Um to fill in information who they're sourcing from that is who they're working with Populate that data into the trustry's platform and form the supply chain mapping If we go even one step up level two The supply chain mapping is then enriched with product data Collection so products or styles that are imported into the platform and the derived suppliers will also manually provide data on the product level And then the third level Is where the data gets even more granular which is often needed today at the material data collection So here the direct or the fabric supplier can provide the details of the yarn or the fibers That's used for making the fabric in the material right So naturally the more upstream you go the more granular data You will get and also the more confident you can be in the data that is collected So i'm going to just show you a bit of the use cases of how Our customers our brands are using the trustry's platform today It's sample data. We cannot give out the the data from our customers. Of course So first of all master data So the brand would have the master data in the plm systems and this is imported into the trustry's platform So this is a sample product of the data that our product that a brand wants to build a supply chain mapping form So when this is imported And depending on the traceability readiness or the levels that I just explained the the views can be a bit different So again, if we're starting from zero and we have this supply chain discovery where the the brands maybe just know the name of the direct supplier Starting point is to use global trade data to predict the supply chain so When a brand First imports this style into the platform it could look something like this so the only visible supplier that you can engage with on the platform would be the green supplier and the rest is just a prediction so we can sense the buyer we can sense the seller the The consignees but All this tinted information that you see it's a suggestion and the data collection could be Not validated. So it's not really sure that it's the true supply chain for that specific product So it's a it's a good start if you if you start that that's that's a good start But we always recommend to to gather more data so level one instead we Do the supply chain mapping again starting with the direct supplier, which is the green supplier that you see and Then they populate the data via declarations For the upstream supply chain. So the data such as supply name facility Material composition downstream suppliers et cetera are captured on the platform and visible to the brand and it would be the brand that is Mandating what data to be collected for this specific style So the green manufacturer you see on the screen that's on boarded on the platform And has declared the supply chain for style one two three but the the amber then represents that manufacturers that are Populated into the data. So the brand might not be able to manage and directly communicate with them But they will see the information So you see also some suppliers are gray and because of the supply chain mapping You realize that they are there in the network of the supplier, but they're not associated with that specific style A red triangle would of course visualize some risks detected for example by this third-party integration with a caron and two points here One of the major outputs when you do this work It's to whitelist the suppliers or to safeguard the suppliers that you're currently having a relationship with And then you can take some action from that data. So this whitelistening is almost equally important as blacklisting because it will It will put some pressure and I think we talked about incentives in some other sessions So this can put some pressure and incentives for your suppliers to declare even more information and continue this relationship with you And And of course at this level the brands also have the possibility to start to collect and validate data that At the different nodes. So already at this step one level up Looking at the u of lb requirements You have a far more detailed supply chain mapping for the specific good The details and the nodes of the the suppliers will be there You have the possibility of course to download this list to send it to authority or for some moan due diligence measures and You can create this digital chain of custody to validate the the digital supply chain of this good already at Level two we go a bit more granular a bit more detailed So here the direct suppliers again are on boarded and the product bill of material would be collected So this brings an even more granular and higher confidence in the data that you have collected And brands can go deeper in the supply chain for products that they would Classify as critical and critical. It could be cotton product or it could be Product that is a flagship product or something like this So again the green suppliers will represent the suppliers that are on boarded on the trust race platform The amber are the ones whose data is just populated The red visualizes some risk And the gray they're not a part of this specific style And then is it all together helps again whitelist the suppliers that you would like to continue working with So at the third level even more granular with material data collection. So here you have your tier two on boarded as well It's not usual, but it's also not uncommon to to have this level of granularity But so the material suppliers is providing supply chain data about the yarn or the fiber suppliers as well So once either these direct or the sub suppliers provide this information on the fabric The the supply chain mapping will be more specific and more reflected accordingly The data collection that you can Upload on the material level can also be the material id or material name Manufacturing name composition, etc. And it can look something like this So now we can go into evidence collection for a sample purchase order. So what we've seen up till now are some samples of how Brands should do before placing an order, right? So to proactively collect and detect and mitigate risks in the supply chain now We are transitioning to pre shipment This is a visual of how the evidence collection may look like for a specific purchase order So let's say it's time for submission and As we know cotton comes with a very complex supply chain and it's a highly prioritized material So you need to collect a bunch of documents And let's say it could be purchase orders. It can be invoices packing lists work orders bill of ladings, etc so we have also built in a translation capability on the platform such that if the documents which often are not in English needs to be translated That can happen automatically and they can be ready for for shipment of submission to some authority So it's not only That we collect these documents for shipments for an authority such as the cbp in terms of ufl pa It could also be for internal validation for due diligence measures or for For your analysis internally So to sum up what trust rates do today for the brands In this apparel industry is we we often trust the data from day one So even if you have very little data to start with You can start Right away and we we have a platform that is intuitive and easy to use for the suppliers Because think about it's also the suppliers that are working and need to need more incentives to do this It should be easy and and quick The granularity and the data conference level it will get higher and more confidence as you go We offer this flexible approach for the different sourcing models as I mentioned because there's not one sourcing model for the All the goods out there in the parallel industry or or in any industry And we accommodate for that. It's a complexity. We're also enterprise ready and we work at scale already We have millions of transactions and thousands of suppliers up and running on the platform already today and Also, importantly, we have this ecosystem approach and we are integration ready. We have apis in and out We have partnered with the key industry leading players So to sum up We have helped brands map their supply chain and collect evidence for about six seven years now It's been all from sustainability front runners to enterprise brands And engaging closely with our customers. We have come to realize that what we have It's not brain surgery. It's it's quite straightforward But we have a good solution that accommodates for u of lpa and it adheres to these different sourcing strategies even if it's supply chain mapping or data collection validation of goods and enabling this connection or discussion with the suppliers So thank you. That's very short about our solution. We're happy to demo and to answer questions If no questions, we will be at the end of the room. Right next presenting is ascent Ascent will be presenting on supply chain mapping methodologies for u of lpa operational guidance and compliance that enhances Supplier screening and regulatory guidance now presenting for ascent is dr. Abhi opechi Um Abhi supports companies in their efforts to integrate human rights into corporate risk management frameworks and supply chain risk analysis She helps companies develop and implement foresaber risk management strategies and address other social risks In a supply chain in compliance with internal and external standards for several corporate offices Abhi holds a phd in public law and human rights Also presenting for ascent is jamie wallish Who is the who is a regulatory and sustainability expert? esg and responsible sourcing jamie's area of expertise is media monitoring specializing in indirect screening And response indirect screening and responsible sourcing She helps companies proactively analyze their supply chains for adverse media mentions Denied parties and human rights issues Jamie has worked closely with the u.s. Department of Labor focusing on conflict minerals child labor csr and esg initiatives Okay, um, good afternoon, and um, thank you to the cbp for this opportunity to present at this event My name is abhi opechi. I am a regulatory and sustainability expert at ascent I'm joined by my colleague jamie who will together will be walking you through ascent some solution for the ufl pa okay, so About before we go into what our solution looks like Just a little bit about ascent who we are as a company Ascent is a data is a supply chain data management company And we help companies to identify and address The compliance risk across a wide range of topics within their supply chain We've been around since 2010 And we have over a thousand employees across four continents Our customer base is primarily within the complex manufacturing space. So we're looking at um, aerospace and defense um automotive industry the electronics industry industrial equipment and medical devices One of the things that we're most proud of as a company is the fact that we're the only north american company that is both Big up certified as well as holding Advanced status with the u and global compact. So we work at all Awesome. Hi everybody jamie wallish pleasure to be here with you all today Um, so just to give a little more context into who ascent is right really want a level set So we if you want to move to the next slide A position ourselves in the the sass platform worlds as a supply chain sustainability partner So what that means is we engage with our clients in all supply chain initiatives That could obviously impact them in terms of their growth around sustainability So we perform and help support data collection in regards to esg as well as product compliance and trade compliance The elements in terms of services that we deliver Include managed services as well as expert guidance, which we'll definitely go into in more detail later on in the presentation But today obviously for the the purposes of this expo, we are going to dive into our ufl pa solution Just to to be mindful and add the caveat that this is just one of the many regulations That ascent follows and it helps deliver in terms of compliance Thanks jamie so um We know from research that more than 90 percent of forced labor occurrences actually occur in The supply chains of private enterprises and of course complex manufacturers Fall into that category, but we also recognize that some of the solutions that are out there for Industries that have shorter and less complex supply chains like the Apparel industry or food industry may not be quite as effective for companies in the complex manufacturing space and so what ascent has done is to tailor a solution That is directly that directly responds to the needs of Complex manufacturers in a way that is aligned to the guidance that the cbp has set out there So for most of us here would be aware that last month cbp released a new set of guidance What is called due diligence or best practices recommendations for what companies should do to in relation to the ufl pa both to prevent Um detention and in the event that the detention does occur what to do with that and so We have tailored our solutions to Marked to each one of these elements these requirements by the cbp And we're going to be walking you through what does each one of those things mean from our sense perspective Yeah, great. Thanks abby. So um before we get into those kind of four major elements. We really want to um Articulate the the baseline and foundation in terms of the solution that we offer regarding ufl pa So kind of the the two main pillars or what you can think of as our approach Is the 360 degree approach and the two main pillars are articulated here one on the left is the direct engagement So we're directly communicating and collaborating with the entities in your supply chain To capture information around those topics that are material to you in this case. It's the ufl pa On the other side of that the other kind of supporting mechanism Um and the other pillar is the enhanced supplier screening or that indirect piece So the exact opposite of direct engagement where we're taking the list of entities in your supply chain and scrutinizing them through the public domain So let's dive more into that kind of second pillar enhanced supplier screening And that really touches on the first element recommended by the cbp, which is the maintain awareness So enhanced supplier screening um is positioned as the methodology to have continuous visibility and exposure Into risks um or unknown hidden risk that's out there within the public space And this isn't not only associated with um suppliers or entities that you give us But as well as their legal affiliations and who they're directly and indirectly associated with Um the elements and features incorporated within the ess solution Includes that we screen on a daily basis in over 200 Million digital sources and platforms. So as you can imagine a wide breath Of sources and material we're trying to capture information from We screened in over 18 plus languages in the native language to make sure that we don't miss any context or substance That's being identified within that information And obviously this is going on at an international and global scale. So we're screening in over 182 countries Yeah, and the second piece of that um guidance is for companies to assess the risk within their supply chain So they can make informed decisions And so that speaks to the second part that um jamie mentioned about a direct engagement. So what we do is um We directly engage your suppliers. Yes, um the kind of open source data That um jamie has spoken about and I think a number of um of presenters have also talked about They are useful But there's the potential there for them to leave gaps Because unless you are capturing every single one of your suppliers with those um kind of open source data Then there are some of your suppliers you're not actually looking at and so the direct engagement piece What it does is it allows you to directly go to your suppliers and ask them and find out What what are their inherent risks? What kind of risk is um associated with them? And what kind of control measures do they have in place to address those risks? But the the solution that we use for this um direct engagement is known as the um slavery and trafficking risk templates Which is an industry risk template um developed by the social responsibility alliance It's been optimized for the zinjiang first labor question um issue and it helps companies to actually Take a risk based approach in that they can look at a specific commodity and use that um tool to trace down Through their suppliers where what is the provenance? What is the origin of those goods? And then you know to understand where the risks lie So that gives a broad depth of insight, you know much more broader than just the open source data on its own And then the other piece the last two pillars of the uflp of the um cbp's guidance kind of looks at how What you're supposed to do to prevent your detention and to overcome detention if it does happen What we do at ascent is we will provide education So we educate your suppliers on the different regulations related to um first labor in particular for this instance The uflp as well as your companies what you need to be doing And then you are in a position to then leverage the risk information That you gather through your direct engagement through your indirect engagement and make an informed decision Do I want to continue operating or um, you know Partnering with this um company or do I want to make any changes? And then you're also able to use all of that information that you gather to build an evidentiary record Which alongside the you know trade transactional documents that the cbp Requires you know to get your goods out of detention You can't provide to the cbp to show evidence of your due diligence that you're actually doing not just what is Expected of you, but you're going beyond over and beyond and um at this junction We're just going to pause for a minute and take a look at a brief Demo of what this whole solution looks like in practice How ascent works Ascent simplifies supplier collection through software and services to identify risks Ascent provides a unique instance of the ascent sustainability manager software to the customer and stores all information collected And this helps identify risks associated with horse labor ESG topics such as climate impact as well as product compliance Starting with the supplier information and the bills and materials provided our team will reach out to the suppliers through an email campaign And manage all communications with suppliers with multi language capability Our supplier success team will be there to help answer your suppliers questions with guidance from our regulatory expert team The uflpa topic can be new to suppliers and the training and support ascent offers will help increase their understanding As well as their responses as your program progresses We can offer more by providing corrective actions based on the evidence review of the policies the supplier provides We will monitor suppliers indirectly using our enhanced suppliers screening to track any adverse media or sanctions lists This along with the direct engagement will give you a 360 review of your supply chain The supplier completes these surveys and corrective action tasks through the free supplier portal Then we offer the results in the form of sustainability report inserts dashboards and other reports All of the topics and surveys are based on the gri framework and sasby reporting recommendations that are overseen by our regulatory experts The first cbp best practice recommendation of maintaining awareness can be met with a sense enhanced supplier screening Our screening can include all suppliers by looking for issues clients went self-report on like child labor Or anti bribery complaints Through corporate tax records We will identify any legal affiliates or beneficial owners of those suppliers and include them in our monitoring This dashboard shows the relevant hits using negative sentiment analysis Using a combination of AI and a team of experts. We will rank these hits high medium or low for example High hits include any denied parties or sanctions lists dashboard filters can narrow down the results In the insights page by your company's business units Any categories or even specific keywords such as weager all of these filters can be used To help identify trends over time As well as display a heat map of where those hits are by which country the second Best practice recommendation of assessing risk and make informed decisions can be met with the strt Ascent asks suppliers to complete the slavery and trafficking risk template or strt This is an industry template Developed by the social responsibility alliance that has been used since 2016 More than 10,000 companies use it to uncover forced labor risks and comply with a wide range of regulations Since 2020 the strt has been specifically optimized to capture weaker forced labor risks One of the greatest strengths of the strt Is its commodity specific traceability approach that allows companies to assess suppliers on the origins of the goods they supply For example, if you were interested in the origins of aluminum in your products Your suppliers would be asked to provide information on the sourcing of that specific product alongside their general forced labor due diligence Suppliers of course complete this questionnaire and demonstrate their internal controls They have in place to prevent forced labor and these are supported by evidence such as policies Ascent also offers a service to review these policies and evidence to verify They need internationally recognized standards and are appropriate to mitigate risk We then offer corrective actions to the supplier to help guide them in creating stronger policies to help prevent forced labor As suppliers upload their completed strt's we will digitize the responses to easily identify risks The dashboard will extract the top five risks Including your supply chain overall risk to human trafficking and slavery Katsa and the links to Xinjiang As part of the steps to assess risks being able to easily identify those suppliers with higher risks Will allow you to make informed decisions before importing your goods The individual responses can be seen here and clicking on the supplier's name will open the individual suppliers profile page Where we can see the responses to the survey as well as any policies they've uploaded Understanding the specific parts purchase from that supplier can be seen here because of a sense cross referencing Here we can see the parts and the part details including the country of origin As well as the HS codes We can apply filters by countries such as china quickly This solution also helps you be proactive in identifying and addressing goods and materials that are not necessarily on cbp's high priority list But for which enforcement actions are being taken as we've seen with aluminum and pvc The third and fourth recommendations of prevent and overcome goods detention can be met with the information gathered This information derived from direct engagement with suppliers Indirect risk assessment through enhanced supplier screening as well as the country of origin information You are now equipped to make informed decisions based on these risks For example, you can determine which of your suppliers have links To Xinjiang and work to remove and eliminate them from your supply chain to prevent detention Our regulatory experts will educate your suppliers and their role in ensuring the goods they supply have no nexus to force labor Generally and to Xinjiang particular in event that you do have goods detained and need to overcome detention You can take the information derived from your supply chain risk assessment To gather with other trade documentation such as transaction records and present it to cbp to prove your due diligence and ensuring your goods Have no nexus in short ascent can provide an audit trail as part of the evidentiary record as needed to your legal counsel To support your efforts to counter goods detention Okay, great. I also just want to give a quick shout out to Maria pool Who's a sales engineer at ascent that delivered this in depth and in thorough demonstrations So thank you to her who's watching To to close out our presentation here today. We just wanted to give a brief note on a business case of a complex manufacturer in the solar industry that came to ascent to utilize our ufl pa solution They were familiar with with ascent based off of again our positioning in the sass Industry as engaging as a supply chain sustainability partner. So they were interested in our ufl pa solution specifically So what we did is we deployed the elements that we talked about today to satisfy those needs So again that enhanced supplier screening to have that continuous monitoring and engagement of all the entities in their supply chain To capture risk within the public space And and make sure they're being very proactive in terms of that engagement and risk out there As well as incorporating that direct Supplier engagement via the strt So now they're very well equipped in positions to have that hard data Intraceable documentation to deliver and show You know their engagement with defensible due diligence obligations and programs. So with that being said, thank you guys so much for your time And we'll open the floor for any questions I literally have people texting me questions that couldn't be here. So I'm asking a question for The audience at large. What do you do with the gaps in the data? You're very bill of material driven and there are tiers to a bill of material in a complex manufacturing environment What happens if you can't get information at tier two tier three tier four? How does that? affect the overall results of your analysis Yeah, thank you for that question. So as someone said yesterday Suppliers are very driven by business interest. I mean their companies after all so and so with the uflpa coming into force lots of suppliers are beginning to understand that this is Cooperation with their with their customers is a condition of carrying on business And so that has tended to be an incentive for companies to provide information that's needed, you know at their own Within their own operations and from their own suppliers and one of the points that we did make in that presentation is the ability of the strt to facilitate a traceability approach For specific commodities and it's similar to some of the approaches that has been demonstrated here It's a cascading approach and for those who are familiar with the conflict mineral space And are familiar with the conflict minerals template the same way that you collect information from subsequent tiers To find your way down to the um smelters, you know of interest is the same way the strt operates So it collects um information from um, you know subsequent tiers of your supply chain Great question. Thank you Thank you for a great presentation. My name is mary. I'm an attorney at miller and chevelier I was i'm really interested in this sort of 360 Idea that you guys have and i'm wondering if you sort of use that to leverage information that you've gathered in the reaching out to suppliers phase and Sort of overlay it on top of the other mapping that you do to authenticate one way or another Yeah, thank you for that and that's absolutely what we try to to tackle is the complementary approach between those different methods of data collection So really how I articulate in position Enhanced suppliers screening is a supporting mechanism to what you're doing on the direct engagement side And also really labeling it a trust but verify solution So you're going out directly engaging with your suppliers You're trying to trust them in terms of what they're uh communicating and delivering to you But sometimes there's gaps. Sometimes they're unknowns. Sometimes they don't respond reply at all, right? So that's when ess comes in to help fill in those gaps But absolutely they should be used in that two pronged approach method And we really believe you you can't have one without the other when it comes to a strong Um foundation of defensible due diligence Yeah, great question. Thank you Great. Thank you. All right. This brings us to our final presentation Which is uh sts synergy technical services usa We're presenting on supply chain mapping methodologies for ufl pa operational guidance and compliance Presenting for sts is maria stoja nova She's the director of supply chain sustainability Sustainability services working towards testing inspection and certification in the solar and storage industry maria is passionate about the responsibility of enterprise for their impacts on society and prior to sts work at csr europe in belgium and with the un office of the high commissioner for human rights maria Hello Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much to cbp for the invitation to present the sts supply chain mapping methodology My name is maria stoja nova and i am director of supply chain sustainability services at sts I will start with giving you some context On the solar supply chain on who sts is and I will focus my presentation on our methodology for supply chain mapping And lastly, I would like to introduce to you our report sharing platform in terms of context 95 percent of solar panels today are produced with polysilicon And this is what the solar module polysilicon supply chain looks like It starts with the quartzite, which is mined from the ground Then it is melted into metallurgical grade silicon, which is further purified into solar grade polysilicon Cast into solar ingots, which are then sliced into wafers From that the solar cell is produced, which is Then assembled into the solar module Today More than 70 percent of the manufacturing at each of these stages takes place in china And for the solar ingot and solar wafer stage This percent goes as high as 95 percent And at sts, we know very well the solar supply chain Where the components are being produced. So this is actually where we are. We are global But our operations are focused in asia our headquarters in Shanghai And in china is where we have our largest fleet of inspectors and auditors We also have our local teams in malaysia, thailand, vietnam and india We have about 100 employees the majority of whom are engineers and are On the ground in the solar facilities where the solar panels are being manufactured A little bit more on what we do We are an audit and inspection body We support the procurement efforts of the solar and energy storage developers We are the pioneers in the solar space We were established in 2010 We are ISO certified which means that we need to avoid any conflict of interest And for this reason we are contracted by the buyers Not by the manufacturers whom we audit We are highly specialized in renewables not only solar but also energy storage and wind And the services we perform for our clients are inspection, testing, auditing and advisory So basically we are the boots on the ground for our clients. We are in the factories 24-7 while the panels are being manufactured making sure that The quality specifications in the purchase agreements are being adhered to And because we are trusted partner for our clients when the HOSHA and WRO was put into place and then later on the UFLPA And there was a need to be conducting traceability audits. We were asked to To start this type of verification as well looking at the traceability systems in place and the documentation available So this is when We developed our supply chain methodology about started about two years ago And I would like to talk a little bit more about how we do supply chain mapping for the solar sector The objective is to verify the suppliers at each stage of the supply chain And then afterwards to verify the provenance of the materials and components And we look at the supply chain Starting with solar module going all the way up to quartzite We developed this methodology based on our deep knowledge of the supply chain our established audit methods And we took as a basis the solar energy association supply chain traceability protocol Which we were the co-authors of in 2021 And we made sure that when the cbp's operational guidance for importance was published that our methodology is completely in line with the guidance our clients Use the supply chain mapping when they're qualifying suppliers and us bound supply chains In order to assess the risk That the products may fall within the scope of the UFLPA Our methodology has three steps First we start with a scope agreement The client and the manufacturer define the product that we are going to map This means that we need to know the manufacturing facility We need to know the manufacturing dates how many pieces of solar modules were produced We also ask for the purchase order as a starting point And then we take this number of the purchase order and then we trace it along the entire supply chain Um The second step is Compiling a self declared list of manufacturers We ask for this as a first stage This is a self declared stage and we proceed to verify this declaration We verify the commercial link between the different entities in the supply chain As well as the traceability of the input And the output at each stage of manufacturing We do that through sampling of documentation And the three types of documentation that we collect and verify commercial records Such as contracts purchase orders invoices proof of payment We look at transport records Which would include packing lists, bill of lading, customs documentation, certificate of origin And also importantly we look at the production records Which are usually kept within the manufacturing facilities such as the incoming materials receipt warehousing records Certificate of analysis the MES records which contain the batch numbers of the input and output And then depending on the documents that we receive for the different suppliers We have four different levels of verification, which we report on If we receive no information at all, this is the unknown level When we receive information even if this information is very detailed and we sometimes receive from manufacturers Details on on the batch numbers for example that we used for certain production But if we have no supporting evidence Then this would remain at a self declared level So this is really our lowest level of confidence when we receive this information, but we're not able to verify it If we have access to documentation, then that's our next level A verification documented level Where we are able to verify the link between the different suppliers But not really trace the product. So this is really the highest level verification Where we have the traceability between input and output usually looking at the batch numbers This is an example of the visuals that we have in the deliverables Our deliverables are reports to our clients In which we map out the supply chain So we present all of the suppliers in the supply chain Which here in this slide you can see are marked with different numbers In different colors. So this is the level of verification that we have reached For each supplier part of the supply chain This example here was put together for the purposes of this presentation But it is actually Very indicative of the level of verification that we're currently seeing within the industry We are able In many cases in most cases to read verification until polysilicon and then upstream There is visibility But it's more difficult to obtain the documentation in order to reach the highest level of verification It is challenging, but I have to say it is possible and it has been done It is just at this moment an exception rather than the norm But I believe that the sector is evolving and for the past two years We have seen huge changes in the level of verification that we can achieve Our supply chain mapping is complemented by a traceability management system audit This is something that we do at site level We evaluate the manufacturer's ability to consistently trace product information We look at how traceability is set up within the site How resources are allocated if enough resources are allocated What is the security of the data but also security of the incoming materials? And lastly how traceability is operationalized within all of the different processes within the manufacturing facility We have based this audit on ISO standards again on the sales supply chain traceability protocol And have made sure that is fully aligned with CVP's operational guidance for importers Our clients use this audit together with the supply chain mapping To evaluate whether a manufacturing facility has a robust traceability system in place And is able to supply reliable traceability information Which then goes on to feed in the supply chain mapping, which I just talked about The reports that we produce supply chain mapping reports and also the traceability management audit reports Can be shared with clients through our report sharing platform When we started traceability this traceability work two years ago We had requests from multiple clients to be conducting traceability audits at the same manufacturing facilities So we decided to group these requests and this is how this sharing platform was born whereby We conduct the assessment as a third independent party And we make the reports available to the clients who requested We launched this program two years ago in 2021. We currently have 40 members So these are the developers the buyers of the solar modules Who are interested to receive the reports on on their manufacturers We have 18 manufacturing manufacturers who are currently participating 52 available reports Spread over three assessment types. So supply chain mapping Traceability management system audit and then the third one is purely quality related. It's a Factory audit An important element here is the confidentiality of data Which is very important when we're talking about traceability and sharing information on suppliers and supply chains We're very careful with how we manage this data And this is why an important element is the authorization process in place The data is owned by the manufacturers themselves and We require the written authorization to share those reports with the clients who request access And this translates into a reduced volume of of audits Um, we don't need to go a number of times to the same manufacturing facility In order for the clients to be conducting data diligence We have designed this program also In line with the recommendations from the force labor enforcement task force for important companies to arrange joint audits and independent verification processes And lastly here, I want to mention our supply chain mapping track record I realized that in comparison to all of the numbers that have been shared here During these two days 18 might seem like a rather low number In comparison to 22,000 suppliers that we heard previously But actually these 18 manufacturers they represent about 40 percent of the Entire manufacturing capacity for solar modules worldwide And we have been conducting Supply chain mappings for not only for solar modules, but also solar cells Wafers ingots and polysilicon and the majority of that has been done in china since as we saw in the beginning This is where the supply chain lies But also vietnam, cambodia, thailand, india us And turkey I would like to leave you with these last three thoughts Traceability of the polysilicon supply chain Is challenging We are seeing great strides forward But I have to say that it still remains a challenge to go All the way up to court side in terms of documentation We have developed a robust solution for supply chain mapping Which we have been applying to the solar sector And lastly, we would like to invite also Other sectors to join in a similar way Initiatives to share reports such as the ones the one that we have developed with the sustainable supply chain program Thank you very much for your attention. And if you have any questions, I would be very happy to answer Hello, maria. Hi, christian roseland from clean energy associates founded in 2008 So I just wanted to ask you mentioned that you do factory audits. Sorry, you mentioned the factory audits. Yes Does that include polysilicon facilities and has your team been in any? We have conducted supply chain mapping at polysilicon facilities So far we have not been requested to conduct factory audits at polysilicon facilities So no presence in polysilicon facilities Well, our clients are the buyers of Solar modules and they are not directly interested in factory audits for the polysilicon part of the supply chain. Thank you Thank you very much All right, so that brings us to the end of the day. So I will spend the next hour talking about uh, just kidding So so first of all, I want to start off Um I want to express my gratitude for our keynote speakers that participated over the last couple days You know starting with dhs undersecretary robert. So robert silvers Cherry chair nary turkle commissioner miller. Mr. Kit conklin Dr. Laura murphy and our federal partners at the department of labor deputy undersecretary thea lee The department of state special representative kelly fade rodriguez and from the hill professional staff member dr El niger yield to beer for their leadership and perspectives and commitments to advocacy to combating forced labor Most importantly, I want to thank every everyone from industry civil side civil society academia and government From both our executive and legislative partners And all the interested stakeholders that joined us here in person and virtually Over the last two days and for those that may be curious. We did a check online We did the check of all the folks that are streaming At lunchtime and today we peaked over 10,000 folks that are live streaming This event so really thank all the folks that are not only attending here in the room But also all the folks that are attending virtually as well. We really truly hope that it's been Quite informative for all of us and productive for for all of us in this engagement Just to highlight you know forced labor is a human right issue I think for you know, we've seen the faces We've seen we've heard some of the stories during over the last two days And for some of the for for those of us or some that may this may be the first time that Maybe you've heard these stories or maybe be the first time that you've seen these pictures I really hope that it's not the first time or not the last time that you take that you really Take a look into some of the accounts and you look at the issues I mean there's a lot of a lot of great reports out there from a lot of the the folks that you've seen in the room today that have produced Um materials reports books on all the the the crisis that's occurring overseas So I really hope that it starts our journey especially for folks that you know that those of us that are Involved in trade compliance and ESG work Especially as we look at how to tackle the issue of forced labor within our supply chains that you know We go in eyes wide open and really truly understanding the issues that are occurring in the Xinjiang region of china Now forced labor is an unfair trade practice that undermines the ability of companies That do treat workers fairly to compete in the global economy It's also the law and it's designed to make us collectively evaluate our supply chains And reduce our dependencies on illicit foreign manufacturing I think we should be proud As a nation as a government as the trade to be the leaders Um And the u.s. Is leading in this space right the trade is leading in the space And our like-minded partners globally around the world are leading and exemplifying this effort To eradicate and address the issues of forced labor that they're occurring overseas Due diligence and supply chains is the key to security and predictability To ensure that we are not complicit and unwitting consumers of goods produced and manufactured with forced labor And it's just good business Now more than ever for more reasons than just forced labor And we do see your efforts From the the ramp up of cbp's forced labor enforcement over the last several years Also with the implementation of the ufl pa we've seen large shifts in supply chains We've seen the trade really working at and exercising due diligence in their supply chains And from the data that that shows in the data dashboard that was released yesterday All that shows you know where we see reductions or shifts Is all kind of exemplary of a lot of the hard work and great work that trade is doing To really look into their supply chains and exercise due diligence within your supply chains and ensure That our supply chains are not going back to sources of forced labor The ufl pa is clear that we all share a collective responsibility to exercise due diligence As many have shared over the last two days this can be done And tools are available to help you What are these tools are technology service services To the articles that investigative media Spend a lot of time and work To publishing as well as the academic studies that are that are published That highlight some of the issues as well as the government reports that are provided and worked from the various departments and agencies across the government Due diligence is most effective when it's proactive and not reactive I think Justin mentioned it today from freedom That many of the methodologies and many of the technologies that you have heard about over the last two days have some similarities So really it's important to pick one one that matches Your company one that matches the way that That that fits your needs And start now And as laura as dr. Murphy shared this morning is that If you know as you put up on our slides that if we can see it, you know, so can you Sometimes it's really that simple I'm reminded of an instance where I had spoke Spoken with an importer who Had done an excessive amount of due diligence To make sure that the supply chain and their manufacturing chain was very refined that they vetted all the importers and sometimes and And so we had a call we discussed Just kind of as more of just an open discussion what they weren't under enforcement at the time and so You know and they showed us the supply chain Six six manufacturers within the supply chain before it was imported to the united states And so me I mean, I don't know, you know looking at these these manufacturers within their supply chain I don't know who they are and they're just names, right? And so I just do a quick google search while they're talking And all of a sudden, you know number three in their supply chain Glaring says relationship with the xpcc You know so sometimes it's just that easy Right and so when you when you highlight that to them, you know, maybe there is you know, some Some embarrassment or whatnot, but sometimes due due diligence can be that easy and so By the way, when I said google I wasn't endorsing it I think it was added to the dictionary as an as actual verb. So there is no endorsement there So I want to thank all the industry presenters that were willing to share their capabilities And your incredible work to figuring out creative and innovative approaches that support Industries effort to illuminate supply chains And to identify for saber risks and make informed to make informed business decisions We hope that this expo provided a unique forum that brings industry together with civil society academia And government to engage to network to build connections and promote a community of stakeholders that together confront our national commitment On the issues of forced labor together We look forward to hearing your feedback on on this expo I know we look forward to future opportunities to hear about your experience hearing from the technology service providers hearing from industry on your experience with these technologies And then bringing folks back together to have the opportunity to chat again So we'll be looking for that opportunity to do that potentially maybe at our upcoming trade summit in april, so we'll see See if that's a possibility we'll have be chatting with otr here with xd pullum and so Before we conclude the expo, I want to extend my sincere appreciation to the cbp team And to the department staff And the inter-agency members that had a part in planning and preparing and coordinating this event certainly a lot of late nights a lot of long hours had gone into Getting through a lot of the you know for those that may be Experience with the federal acquisition process Those that may be experienced with putting on a wedding or or some type of event like this It's not a not an easy ordeal So a lot of blood sweat and tears maybe not blood but a lot of sweat and tears had gone into the planning of this expo so really Really, thank you to the cbp team and the folks that had put this event together So thank you so much and for your support and collaboration on this very important mission It is really truly to see really wonderful to see everyone face to face. I know that Um, there's a lot of very familiar faces in this room I think when we get into this uh into this space that there is a lot of familiarity And it's really wonderful especially over the last couple years to really See the do the face-to-face engagement again Where you know, we've gotten used to just doing the exchanges over email, but I really appreciate that and I hope that This continues that we have the opportunity to to really engage face-to-face again, and it's just the start of this This type of engagement So I really just want to say I wish everyone A wonderful rest of the week and safe travels home To all the folks that are online in the virtual environment You know, I wish you all kind of the A great rest of the week as well and that uh that this has been a very productive And very fruitful Expo for everyone. So with that we'll conclude the expo and thank you for everyone's participation All right. Good morning. Boy, that's a tough act to follow, huh? I'm going to shift gears just a little bit. My name is Vincent Nunziata I'm the director for the business transformation and innovation division and um had the good fortune of working Both on modernization and innovation products, but also Working in some of the Uighur dilemmas that we're dealing with now Um, I have a great panel today. We'll be talking about innovation and how we're investing Some of these panelists when they turned in their bios. I expected to get a paragraph and I got autobiographies So it was quite the uh, I was like no seven sentences. That's all you're getting So we really got a hefty group. I want to though start off Um, you know, we talk about innovation Innovation the way that we term it is really the it's the art of change, right? Being able to find some efficiency whether that's in time Or money and that's what makes it worthwhile for us to invest Um, and recently I had a conversation with my son of all people that really starts to articulate that now He's my namesake. So we call him little Vinny, but he's really 5 10 and he uh towers over me Make sure he does that all the time, but he he sits down on the couch and then he goes So dad and already I'm ducking because you know when you get those two words as a parent, you know, something's coming at you and he says You ever been to a library? Now I'm stunned here, right? And I'm trying to imagine where this is going because I know I've taken them to the library I remember reptiles and all that other stuff that we saw there and books And I know my wife's taken and he sees that I'm not you know, I'm kind of confused So he says uh, uh dad. No, I mean When you were younger like when you went to school How did it work? Okay, so I said well, you know when I was younger I couldn't drive There so you know, but when I got my car I was hardly able to go. It's no no no dad How did it work? So I said well, I'd go in I'd look at our an index and I'd look up these books And if I had trouble I'd go to the librarian and I could see I'm not connecting So how do I make that connection? Google search So said Vinny I said, you know when you go in and you do you know you type in some key words I said and it brings you right into what you got to get to He goes, yeah, now he's starting to get it I said in my day I used to have to take the books put him out on the desk lay him out And I'd have to search through chapters and actually read to find the words He goes you had to read Now what am I talking about right now It's a generational gap, right? But what's happening in this day and age is that the innovation is moving so quickly Companies have to be very very careful about what they're investing into because every time a bright shiny object comes up It doesn't mean it's going to work. The company may not last It may not be what's promised So what I wanted to do is bring the groups that are dealing with some of this so you can see how the government is investing Into this technology and we have some great people here today. I'm going to start with By the way, I'll be introducing all four of you and then we'll get into the questions Okay, if we have some time afterwards, maybe you can ask some questions as well So anneal john, he's the technical director for the u.s. Department of Homeland Security Silicon Valley innovation program Which works with innovation communities across the nation And around the world to adapt develop and harness cutting-edge technologies and capabilities that are commercially Sustainable while simultaneously Meeting government needs. Thanks for coming here today anneal Um next to him. I have uh, mr. Valley Oliver who's graduated from the united states naval academy in 2005 Where he obtained his bs degree in computer science He has an ms degree in information technology Serves six years with the u.s navy and was awarded multiple achievement awards and medals in the military He's worked with booze allen as a systems engineer And he was a part of the u.s. Army software marketplace And now he's currently working as the deputy Executive director under tom mills who couldn't be here today due to a last minute change So thank you mr. Oliver for filling in for us next to valet i have Mr. Dan salise who is selected as the assistant commissioner for import operations And he's worked there as a division director of west coast imports into february 9th 2018 He's recognized expert in fda import operations And has served as the acting assistant commissioner for office of enforcement and import operations since march 29th 2020 During this time. He's provided leadership and direction to all oe i o field import divisions As well as the division of food defense targeting and division of import operations At fda hq. He brought about leadership and stability needed during the covet 19 pandemic and now he serves as the principal advisor to the associate commissioner for regulatory affairs And reports to the deputy associate commissioner for regulatory affairs docra on all matters He provides direction and insight to human and animal food and leading the development of implementation of new import programs and procedures next to and welcome Mr. Solis and then next to him is Matthew Burke and he Thankfully, we had to make two changes here stood in for steve kasada and then also the dak Prashusha house. So we really had to Uh, he really came in at a last minute. So thank you Dr. Burke has been with cbp's laboratories and scientific services for 14 years and is currently a senior science officer He began in new york laboratory as a chemist and supervisor for 13 years Prior to moving to lss headquarters throughout his career's primary focus has been the analysis of trade goods for classification And country of origin by chemical and genetic analysis Since 2022 dr. Burke has served as a senior senior science officer with oversight of lss's country of origin program He's also a u.s. Delegate to the world customs organization scientific subcommittee As is served as an associate member of the organization Of scientific area committees wildlife forensic subcommittee and several interagency scientific review panels So welcome matthew. All right. Um, so we're going to get into the questions And of course, you know the first question i'm going to ask all of you is whether or not you've ever been to a library Of course, all right. Mr. John, you and I have been working together for many years Especially in the standards area. Could you please talk a little bit about what role the standards play in technology implementation? Um, for sure One of the things that became that has become clear I'm sure both yesterday and obviously in the key notes Today is the role of data and the quality of the data and the fidelity of the data In being able to make good decisions now if you are An organization like cbp that is as old as america You have two choices before you how you want to get that data You can do a one ring to bind them all and tell people how you want it Or you can basically work Together in order to define a common set and a framework for how data should be understood The best way to do that is not to do it governmenty Is actually to use open standards Open mechanism open standards or develop an organizations in order to define How data should be structured and how it should be coming into the house, right? And I also want to Be very clear when I speak about standards organizations, there is a carnage industry in what they what is called standards where You actually have a whole bunch of you know vendors and things like that getting together in organizations And creating what they call standards, which then you need to pay in order to access and use What i'm talking about is basically working in a globally recognized Standards develop an organization where the output of those standards is open royalty free and free to use For the single person all the way up to the multinational And that is the value that standards a common way of representing information And common way of representing how we connect different systems together becomes very important All right, thank you. You know and and these standards are really a global community We're really looking to reach around the world not just within the us border So these standards really are making a huge impact now valet You're on the side of actually implementing and working with oat. You have a huge enterprise probably one of the most complicated Pieces of architecture we've seen and we're one of the largest transactional systems in the world So managing that is huge. Can you talk about some of the exciting technological advances that you think would enhance trade in commerce? Yeah, so um to start off with my I I think I've used the library a little bit when I was a kid My kids have no idea what a library is so With that said the system he's talking about is the automated commercial environment the a system which My it folks that we mentioned development for and in order to stay In line with the future we have to continue to infuse it with technology in order to get you know the best out of trade So we work side by side with places like the small business innovation research research folks To give them to receive presentations and to find ways that we can Solve some of the the bigger issues that we have in the supply chain We work with the nils team with the silicon valley innovation program And we also work with the invent the innovation team, but a lot of those Partnerships that we have Evolve into coming up with proofs of proofs of concepts and other technology things that we want to put into our system so one of the things that that we we you hear out in the world with the Cryptocurrency is the the use of blockchain blockchain is a technology that's considered. It's called a distributed ledger technology We're not trying to use it from a cryptocurrency level but we're trying to use it as a way to Maintain the the proof of concept or the control of data as we exchange data through Our traditional partners are non-traditional partners. So we have several dlt projects In in the works and I think that's a great thing for the the A system With that said, there's some other technologies that we're leveraging We got a lot of use with called the robotic processing automation The ability to let our machines do some of the work that will free up our humans in order for them to do More of the investigation some of the things that we here at cbp actually need to do And this has pushed the ace system forward and we're looking forward to continue to to leverage those technologies One of the projects that I came on earlier With the ace program was trying to modernize it and put most of the system into the cloud the platform of the service And and we've been able to leverage a lot of technologies in order to cloud a fire system So we can be better in a better position to serve our our user community So they can have access to ace and to the other systems I have On any device at any time in order for them to do their job So that's some of the technologies that we're infusing into our system Thanks, valet. I know we're doing a lot of work in the robotics processing right now And the amazing thing is it removes the redundancy over and over one person have to do something maybe on a daily basis Whatever it happens to be and running it darn near instantaneously. So that's making a major impact in what we're doing today Now Dan, you and I have been working a long time together You know, originally we did the single window back with the original ace which is running today with all the partner government agencies 48 agencies making use of that 13 of which are actually processing along with us fda being one of the largest processors of that information as well and And dan's been working very closely with me on a lot of the modernization efforts that we're doing now going into The proof of concepts that we're running On what we're doing in standards. So dan, how does fda monitor supply chain shortages for critical medical product supplies? And and how about any lessons learned from your experience in the pandemic? Oh, yeah, thanks for having me and You you failed to mention that we both started right out of kindergarten And that you know, we've been working at this for such a long time You know, you don't want to date ourselves on how long we've been working on this Yeah, first of all, Vinny and my cbp colleagues. Thank you for inviting fda here It's a I think it's a testament to partnership and the ability for all of us collectively to To catch up with technology. I think technology is outpacing our ability to enforce and we need Not not only the partnership within the federal side But as as many of the previous talkers are talking about really in partnership with the trade and industry we regulate Um, a lot of innovations. I think from you know, not only The data that's coming in but that feeds into how we make invisibility decisions on the fda side You have to appreciate each one of the fda commodities that we regulate From food and drugs and medical devices each one has a different center with their own Requirements and and laws that we have to enforce at the border So when we're coming into an enterprise-wide solution, we're having conversations with Vinny and his group We have to consider the requirements of a drug of a medical device and food cosmetics, you name it What was very interesting is you come across individuals like Vinny who Can look at a problem And you can present problems there, but really what we're driving at is are there solutions out there? Maybe not within the confines of our discussion But there is a solution out there and it's it's people like Vinny that really knows how to connect the docs What we've been able to do on the fda side one advantage that we do have We know how a product that fda regulates of being manufactured From the sole source component and we call it a you know supply chain mapping just like everyone else But we tie this into a matrix that goes all the way to distribution point Beyond just the importer here in the us all the way to retail outlets and our state partnership And what we try to do is when we're working together on different enforcement cases We we tie a lot of these key elements together And and you know build a case that we need to that goes up to doj On the innovation side what's very interesting is a lot of companies really are intent on being compliant with CBP laws with fda laws so that at ports of entry our job really is not to stop commerce It's really looking at the small percentage that want to circumvent that process So we have a lot of different tools in things like the import alert But also we've been utilizing a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning to really target the highest risk There's a lot of redundant processes that each one of our systems We we can probably all admit that we can reduce a lot of these redundant And ai is the way for us not to take over the human intelligence But really can we augment the the redundant systems and make it more efficient So those are some of the things that we've been able to utilize in concert and support fda's been there From the beginning on the 21 ccf effort and along those lines is because of the lessons learned like viny said We learned a lot on how to expedite critical medical Supplies and get them the health care providers at a much faster rate We did we did this obviously with cbp and fema and we're taking a lot of that lessons learned In that emergency use authorization world and can we apply it for a normal mode? And the thing the good news is we're walking away now with better platforms And then you know expediting a lot more in in the release of compliant shipment today You know versus say five years ago before the pandemic even even hit An fda has been contributing for Now it's several years on the efforts that we have going forward with the standards that we're talking about from the beginning with with anneal john And you know the hope is that we keep that single window single right? We don't want to start getting disparate systems growing around that we're trying to keep it single So we're chunking down the information Making it more discreet and trying to get back to origin as far back as we can in the supply chain So when you start thinking about Uighur and what we're trying to do when you're sourcing all the way back to your suppliers It's giving us an advantage to miss to mix the Uighur technologies in with this modernization effort So you're starting to see a multi pronged approach to tackle this. So that's why this is pretty amazing in this area Now matt you work on the scientific end of things and I know we've started recently working together a lot with research With dhss and t but could you talk a little bit about how the labs assist cbp with verifying the supply chain and the imported goods Yeah, good morning So for anybody who doesn't know cbp actually does have a lab system the laboratories and scientific services And we're really the provider of science and technology to the greater cbp Greater cbp world So in this context of what we're talking about here Most of our most of our services go to either the office of trade or office of field operations Where we're in constant communication with them constant communication with people like many To assess what those different components of cbp actually need what questions they need answered through the scientific or technical processes And in this case, I'm not talking about it technical. I'm talking about biology physics Anything along those kind of lines LSS's history goes back almost all the way to the beginning of cbp Our first jobs were analyzing sugar and alcohol You know really important things for the colonists The first questions that we answered were what is it and how much is there? Which is what tied into the tariff rates for the goods at that time Over time the questions that we're answering have gotten just exponentially more difficult Things that we're trying to answer now is where was something grown? Where was something mined? What path did it take before it arrived in the united states? Over the last 15 years of my career almost 15 years We've used these kind of quest we've used this these kind of questions have been in enforcement of anti-dumping countervailing duties JDAC determinations various trade agreements NAFTA CAFTA USMCA And now the Uyghur force labor prevention act is kind of the newest iteration of that It's important to to note here that we've always been looking at supply chains LSS has always been involved in validating supply chains But most of the time the supply chain that we've been interested in as customs has only gone back a little ways So when we're talking about anti-dumping The thing that's important is the country of origin for cbp purposes When the last substantial transformation was made now with the ufl pa Country of origin doesn't mean where was the shirt manufacturer or where was the solar cell put together? It goes all the way back to the very first Where was the cotton grown? Where was the cotton ginned? Where was the polysilicon mined in order to make the solar panel? It's a much bigger supply chain that now we're trying to look at through a scientific lens than what we've done in the past The other thing that LSS provides to office of trade and office of field operations very frequently is is technical translation services Is kind of what I like to call it interpreting technical documents translating scientific jargon providing expert opinions On the validity of scientific claims that the trade is making to cbp So a lot of the work we do is looking at certificates of analysis looking at manufacturing processes And explaining that to our customers oops To the office of trade and the office of field operations. What's going on there from a chemical perspective from a biological perspective The ufl pa supply chain validation or any kind of supply chain validation that's going to look at the the forced labor problem Is going to incorporate all of these different things that lss has been involved in Eac high smith yesterday Made the comment that technology is not a silver bullet for knowing what your supply chains are And speaking as a chemist she's a hundred percent right There's nothing that you can do With science to secure your supply chain by itself It's a really important component. It's a really powerful component In order to spot check in order to audit in order to answer a very specific question About what is going on in your supply chain Having a really well documented supply chain means having information on every step of the process knowing everything back to the raw materials That turned into your final products Testing scientific testing throughout your supply chain is really going to inform what's going on and You know Verify that what your suppliers are telling you are accurate Lss's role in all of this within cbp is to provide an independent test Outside of what you're doing an independent test for cbp to verify that the claims that are being made to cbp are accurate All of cbp cares about facilitating legitimate trade into the united states And that's really lss's goal here is to take the supply chain data that you're providing to cbp And checking it and making sure yes everything you're telling us is off is is accurate. It's all good All right. Thank you, matthew. Um, you know, what's amazing here is you start to see You know that coagulation, right? So you have standards so that anywhere in the world somebody can submit data to us to get from origin all the way into importation We have the o it now working on making sure the new technologies that we have are not only appropriate for our system But are working so that our operators have an efficient tool in front of them In fda, you have the business case the need for having to do that and cbp as well And then the physical verification so you could start seeing the culmination of all that So let me move into round two of the questions And anil, you know, I like to tease you all the time, right because um When anil was working on the standards at the global level with the w3c He was been working in them for five years and anil how long did it take to get that first international working group? Once cbp got on board um so obviously Was it like two weeks It was it was um One of the one of the advantages of again a part of the u.s. Government that is as old as america uh, basically picking And noting that open standards are important is that it there is a certain Um gravitas that comes along for the ride with that was a great strategic move there on your part anil Anyway on that note, right? So I I see branda back there She was one of the signatories to that memo that was written by cbp on how important open standards are in doing that and obviously um Anne-Marie has been a huge champion to move that forward as well. Absolutely want to acknowledge both of those contributions It's been a it's a great partnership and and now What are the standards and and why are they important to cbp? Why don't we talk a little bit now to get down to the business level so the folks can understand what we're We're going with this So we keep talking about standard standard standards the standards are important about having said that one of the common Um comments that are made is You know, uh standards are great. There are so many of them, right? So and one of the challenges with that is people assume That's simply because you are following a standard that the systems that are Implementing those standards are truly interoperable that they actually can work seamlessly without any problems That is complete and total bullshit Right. So so the long and the short of it is basically standards are created in standards organizations by people and people are complex and they negotiate they Do a lot of give and take so often when you have a standard what you end up with is Basically a set of compromises and often those standards Actually have multiple ways of doing the same thing So that vendor a who was participating in the standards organization implements a capability using one way Vendor B who is implementing that standard Basically uses another way both of them claim standards compliance. Neither of them can talk to each other That is not a path to success So the priority for us within CVT and DHS in the work that we've been doing Is to ensure that the standards that we are Um championing and using are truly demonstrated to be interoperable Which means it's not simply a matter of ensuring that you show that you're compliant to standards You can do that using a set of automated test suites, but we also require The entities that we're working with to Do something very old-fashioned what we call a plug fest Which is where you bring your infrastructure To the same table And you connect them And see if it works And ultimately the point of that is to make specific choices Within the scope of the standard that ensure interoperability. So when I talk about that I'm going to go one level deeper on the technical side. I am a technologist. So forgive me If I so at the end of the road We need information in a manner that is semantically aware Which means that we are using link data json link data is the foundation of the information That we are representing in a various bill of lading variety of other things out there We are using A couple of very open global standards that we contributed to and we are championing at the w3c Call verifiable credentials data model, which is a way of representing data in a very open Format and this is important I keep mentioning the standards are important and standards are usable only if it is Usable by the by anybody who wants it that they should not be a gatekeeper between you and using the standard You should not have to pay to use a standard So the ability to use verifiable credentials in order to represent information in a standardized manner Which cvp and the companies that we are working with are working out in public In developing a traceability vocabulary using that standard that you can contribute to on github You can basically influence you can bring your stuff to it. It is open public And global and the other one is basically how do you represent entities in the supply chain? We use a standard that are called decentralized identifier That allows us to basically assign uniqueness to entities within supply chains and in other areas as well the combination of those standards combined with interoperability testing and again I think there was a comment made that it is really really important that basically self assertion of standards compliance is not enough We truly need to test for interoperability because at the end of the road If you're in the business of providing data to cvp You need to provide it in a manner that is openly consumable and I'll just leave this i'll i'll i'll bring it down to one particular Example that dr. Murphy brought up during her a keynote as well at the end of it She mentioned that they're basically coming out with a you know open platform That basically is mapping the supply chain and things like that I am really looking forward to actually learning from her the standards and the data models that they're using To see if they are indeed something that can be easily plugged into the broad ecosystem that is out there and and and it is usable by the global audience for Something that she's producing right so standards interoperability are really important in this particular space and an eel as much as I tease you I know that you set up all of that groundwork so that us cis and cbp could get into this Global community of standards as well So I never take that away from you On top of that the fact that you set up a test suite so that any company that wants to work with us Has to publicly pass We can see whether or not you've passed those tests in order to work with us so that you are Interoperable with the cbp system because the thing that we want to avoid is getting into a situation is where we're constantly Customizing and playing catch up I want to add one point to that right so cbp was forward leaning in thinking ahead that If we control that test suite There would be a lot of people hesitant to use it So one of the decisions that cbp made in this particular space Is to actually contribute and develop the test suite under a standard to develop an organization So that anybody could use it Anybody could fork it anybody could basically test it privately before you make public whether you're interoperable or not So you have the opportunity to go and pull that down From the github repository for the test suites tested on your own infrastructure. And when you're ready Claim compliance or lack thereof and and that's really really important because If you don't make it easy for people to verify compliance They're going to consider that to be a really really challenging problem and Whole lot of drama ensues All right. Thank you ania and valet I know you spend your nights worrying about tech So why don't we uh switch a little bit and talk about how you're staying up on these new techs That are rapidly advancing and what you're doing to control that area. Yeah, thank you. So One thing that we have to think about as as we look at it Is cyber security um cyber security does keep myself and my my colleagues up at night Because technology is moving fast. It's moving faster than Sometimes we can keep up with so What do I mean by by necessarily thinking about cyber security? All this data all the things that we've talked about today, and i'm pretty sure you we've talked about, you know, yesterday Um, it's usually sitting in a system somewhere and that data is very valuable to A lot of folks to our adversaries to our corporate partners internally to the government and if we allow that data to be accessed or to be manipulated By folks that aren't You know have our best interests in mind it could be a problem And so, you know, we have to think about as we Incorporate new technologies in our systems. What is the cyber security Concerns for that so one of the things that that that has been prevalent in my Short government career is that we are trying to move everything to the cloud And when we hear the word let's go to the cloud cloud's going to make everything better But the question I have to ask is you know as we move our Technology and our resources our data into the cloud Is that cloud provider also using the best cyber security? Technologies and methodologies that keep our information safe. So there's a trade-off there from the The advancements are going to the cloud and understanding the cyber security concerns now With that said, I'm a huge advocate going to the cloud. I think one of the other things for those of us who Have to report to our leadership is when we go to the cloud we shouldn't lead with This is going to save us money And I think a lot of people here is I'll go to cloud save money. We should leave with this is going to Give us the ability to be more nimble more efficient and our ability to add to our technologies add to our applications to give Our supply chain folks better ways of changing and updating guidance in a faster Manor because the technology is built in such a way Um, the savings may come in the future, but initially it's to do that now. What does that have to do with cyber? We can hold our cloud providers accountable with when we move to to the cloud and say hey, you know It's imperative of them to be sensitive to our cyber Concerns in order to keep our information protected and by pushing that responsibility and that concern off to our cloud providers That'll give us more resource resources internally to do other great things for our supply Our supply chain and finally one of the things that I also harp on with with my staff and when I have these conversations about it It's just the way that we government procure and do it acquisition. I think with the way The technology is moving at the speed that it is Sometimes our way of getting the dollars in the cover of money and how we procure it Hasn't kept up with how technology is actually Being put out into the world. So the one example is is with how cloud charges people in the real world How cloud charges people in the real world, um, you know, it's it's it's done based on the actual usage Well, you know, it's kind of hard to budget for actual usage We don't know what that usage is until that moment So we need to start keep coming up with some creative ways to do Our procurement strategy as we do it acquisitions And if we when we do that we can start adopting technologies at a faster rate We can do it in a more secure manner and we can just Have technology work for us and help us modernize some of our systems that Let's face it kind of kind of date it and you know, we need to be able to put the information in our Customers hands regardless if they're on a mobile device regardless if they're on a workstation or office Regardless if they're on the in a vr headset five years from now We have to be able to be nimble to be able to do that and you know, hopefully that's some place where The oi t and cbp can start building our systems to support All right, thank you valet and you know as a business person one of the questions that I started asking the tech folks is What is the exit plan now? Just because we're getting into a new technology you have to know how to get out of it Because if there is a rapid rate of movement and you want to get into the next technology How do we break from the one that we're currently Investing into and then have a strategy to get into the next So that becomes really important now dan You have some some work going on with the Uighur region as well. Can you talk a little bit about that for us? Yeah, I think from a supply chain standpoint. We're very much supportive of the labor act many of fda regulated products is coming from the region and You know cbp being the primary fda plays a role Before it's actually distributed if if it passed through the multiple screening and it gets to an fda review We're quick to share that kind of information because Not only are a lot of raw materials coming from the region. We know how it's being manufactured So so you know our our point in a lot of this really is the communication piece Between us and our federal partners and that collectively we have a whole host of data Internally that now, you know through several means mo use for example We're able to share a lot of this intel and proactively in the world of Federal government We work plan at the beginning of the year so that we target these these high risk ports of entry together And that's you know something that we continue to do Year in and year out Thank you dan and uh matt The um technologies can you talk a little bit about the technologies that you guys are currently Investing into for the validations and and all of that as well Yeah, absolutely so Let me start with kind of what I said in my first answer and just reiterate that No single scientific analysis or even you know scientific suite of analyses Can really completely map out a supply chain It seems obvious. It's been said multiple times throughout all of this, but it really bears repeating If nothing else so that I can keep telling myself that I'm a scientist science can solve everything right? What science can do is it can clarify and reinforce knowledge of particular steps in your supply chain The technology that lss chooses in order to answer a particular question depends on exactly what question we're trying to answer And on the identity of the commodity that we're trying to answer it about And I realize that sounds vague so far So the first thing is really is the technology compatible with the commodity so Just by way of a very simple example if we have a Technology platform that relies on the sample being a liquid. It's not going to be appropriate for doing a solid sample Silly, but it's it's a real serious consideration The second thing is that the technology has to correlate to the question that we're actually trying to answer If the data we're trying to get at is where is cotton grown? Then technology that tells me the color or the quality of the cotton Is not really relevant to the information we're trying to get so In terms of determining where something came from and that's a very big and a very broad question I'm just going to give you kind of a laundry list of things that cbp has used in the past to get at that information We've used gas chromatography gas chromatography mass spec Direct analysis in real-time mass spec. That's dark for people who who know that nuclear magnetic resonance inductively coupled plasma mass spec Light and heavy isotope ratio mass spec genetic analysis I'm probably missing some in there. These are the ones that immediately came to the top of my head And I'm not entirely sure this is the this is the crowd for getting into Into super tight details on that kind of thing anyway um A really important point to make is that it's not the exact technology that we use at lss That's really important, but it's how we choose the technology in order to answer a particular question It always comes down to what question are we being asked and If anybody out here has a kind of a statistical background You'll know how important it is to have a very well-defined very narrowly defined question The same is really true in science We can't ask vague questions like is this supply chain secure? That's not a question science can answer Did this cotton grow in the Uighur region? That's kind of a question that science can answer Is this cotton consistent with the Uighur region? That's a question that science absolutely can answer The question is really important Ideally lss wants to use multiple different technologies to answer any particular question And the reason for that is that it improves our confidence in the results. We're getting The next thing that we look at when we're choosing a particular technology is that it's difficult to circumvent Anything that we look at if it's easy for someone to circumvent that particular test They will and I'll give you a really really basic example From another project we're working on and this is very well known in the food commodity world Honey So honey is mostly composed of two sugars fructose and glucose It's very easy to adulterate honey by adding sucrose to it. It makes it a lot cheaper and it's just as sweet That's really easy for us to test for well as soon as the people who were cheating wanted to find out if we were testing for it and We're getting nods over here because this is really partially an FDA problem as well The easy way to circumvent that is you stop adding sucrose and you have high fructose corn syrup Which chemically looks an awful lot like honey It was a great test, but it was insanely easy to circumvent That doesn't do us a whole lot of good in the long term What we try and do is we try and think through potential circumvention routes in order to Make in order to plan for what we're going to do when the circumvention arises And something that's really important to lss we need to make sure that the technology we're using has peer reviewed academic literature support That is especially important for lss operating in a law enforcement environment We're a forensic science lab And nobody else here is probably going to be using forensic science labs to do these kinds of analyses But cbp has to We have to consider things like the dauber criteria for court admissibility when we determine what our methods are Everything we do is in support of law enforcement actions. And that's the very definition of forensic science Why i'm bringing that up is that Lss gets asked very particular questions that are relevant to cbp And that are relevant to a law enforcement environment We have a very particular point of view that may not a hundred percent Match the kinds of questions that you're asking about your supply chains So knowing what technologies we use For any particular question isn't necessarily going to be a hundred percent relevant Do you choosing technologies to look into your supply chain? You may have different criteria different questions that you're trying to get answers to Technology that's perfect for me in my role may not be technology that's perfect for you and yours and I'll give you an example that specifically rates Specifically relates to the ufl pa and cotton since that's a big one right now The question we're asking Is is this cotton consistent with having been grown in the Uyghur region in china? The question you may be asking depending on what you're trying to get at in your supply chain is Is the cotton that's in this final product did it come from this particular farm in georgia? Or this particular farm in brazil or this gin or this mill? That's a different question than the ones we're asking and you may use different technology to actually get at those answers When you're trying to decide what kind of scientific Technology you might apply to secure your supply chains to validate your suppliers Here's just a couple things that occurred to me to think to consider So looking around at the expo looking around at the science and technology providers that have that have spoken here Take the time to consider whether what you're looking at is defensible and I don't necessarily mean defensible in court That's kind of my problem But defensible to cbp or defensible to your own internal qc processes Doesn't have a firm basis in the literature. You want to have something that has some background That's been proven to be to work What holes are there in the process and I mean the entire scientific process Planning for sampling actual sampling the entire scientific testing How you report the results how you get those results? And if you plan on using that scientific testing to back up your supply chain claims to cbp How are you going to transmit those results to cbp in a way that we're going to look at And we're going to say yes, we trust that that's real That's an enormously important question to be asking yourself Um Just to preempt the question that I assume is going to come No lss is not going to endorse any particular technology or any particular technology provider to answer any particular question Um, I gave you kind of a laundry list of things that we work on You can probably figure out which ones we use for certain different questions But um our role is not to provide that kind of information and uh, I can't um, but really Same thing that everybody said it's having really clear knowledge Of your supply chains is the important thing Using scientific testing to gain some very narrow very specific insights into your supply chain Is the thing that you need to consider and then consider whether you can Get that in a form that you can use that evidence when you give it to cbp to support your supply chain knowledge All right. Thank you very much. Uh, listen folks. We are running late on time So, um, I'm going to ask you to applaud this panel and we're going to move off to get into the next Well, I really appreciate everybody and the panelists today. Thank you very much All right. Well, good morning. Um, I'm uh for those of you who I don't know My name is Eric Choi. I'm the executive director for the trade remedy law enforcement directorate in the office of trade It's really my distinct pleasure to be able to To uh to host for the be your host for the rest of the day But also to welcome everyone back for the second day in the final day of the expo And certainly for the folks that this is your that you who weren't here today And this is your first day here not only for the folks that are here in person But also all the folks that are joining us virtually online as well I just want to welcome you all Just to kind of highlight for everyone when we have a significant amount of folks that are here in the room But also just for our interest that you know, yesterday Late yesterday in the afternoon We did a query in a poll to kind of see how many folks were participating Virtually and online and we had nearly 9 000 folks that are doing simultaneous live streams On the on the uh the the live webcast so really Appreciate all the folks that are joining us. I think very critical conversations that are that are ongoing today And really appreciate all the folks who are joining us online and live through the live stream So for all the folks that may have heard this yesterday But for all the new folks that are here that weren't here yesterday There's a few housekeeping tips realizing that that we've had a long morning and now i'm between you and and uh in a break But let me just get through a few housekeeping tips real quickly So first of all we have an incredible cbp team that's back with us today that's helping to support this event that and so if If you look around you see folks with the green lanyards on They're the folks that are here from cbp across the the agency. They're here to support and help So if you have any questions or concerns or need to figure out where that, you know, simple Simply just where the bathroom is, you know, just ask them, you know reach out We have the support staff around around the uh the area, but also just to highlight that We are very fortunate to um Have Folks we have an area back in the rotunda where we have industry back at the tables We know that there's a lot of very important conversations that have been going on throughout the day yesterday and already today as well But we also have our ct pat table back there. So folks a lot of critical Evolutions that have been in current within the ct pat program So if any you have any questions with regards to any of the latest Updates and changes and what's going on with cb pat the team is there and they're ready to answer any of your questions And and certainly as you heard from industry yesterday that industry's hiring we're hiring too. So We've also got you know as as has been highlighted in these slides This morning. We have a table out there if you'd like to learn more about cbp There's a table back there with folks that can answer your questions And and there's some chalk keys there that are kind of cool, which i'm going to try to grab later on today So um, so we also do encourage we've got the continental rooms here on the side We know that the tables are being used for conversations But you know, maybe you want to have conversations that are a little bit more proprietary And and you need some space to do that So we do have rooms along the side for you to go to use those rooms to leverage those rooms to have those conversations And we really encourage these connections of the networking opportunities that that this expo may present So for the one of the more important fundamentals, there is wi-fi available here in the rb It is secured with a very highly secured password. So i'll read it slowly The password is cbp123 and if that's hard to remember It is it is marked in various areas that or just ask someone with a green lanyard and they can reiterate what the password is So there are there are multiple bathroom options for the folks that weren't here yesterday And they're marked on on the on the program itself. So When we transition between sessions, you'll hear the chimes. There's folks that's going around with the with the chimes And so we'll ring the chimes as we're getting ready, you know, we're usually with women within one or two minutes out To begin the next session. So listen for the chimes when you hear the chimes You know, please make your way back and get ready for the next session So we're going to be moving into the industry presentations here next And so just kind of the general format with the industry presentations about 15 to 20 minutes You'll hear from the presenters, which will give plenty of opportunity for folks that may have questions For the specific technologies or capabilities that are being presented So please, you know, if you have any questions, please ask because you know, your questions may benefit all You may have similar questions that that may not want to stand up and ask um, so If we run out of time, uh, please see our event support Our event support team members in the rotunda so we can make sure any of your questions are answered That may be specific to the event or or we could maybe help to point you in any one specific direction And then lastly as you see kind of in between you may see disclaimers that are up here So I just do want to highlight just briefly that as we move into the presentations that The purpose of the of the event is to provide a platform for sharing across the private sector from industry to industry So cvp is not endorsing any particular technology or technology or technology provider that's being presented today as well So most importantly, uh, we will we're going to be taking a 10 minute break before we get into the industry presentations Again, listen for the chimes And I look forward to seeing everyone back after the break. So we'll um reconvene back here at 10 20 Thank you