Trace Material Criticality Across the Supply Chain

A global organization was already using ABC analysis to prioritize finished goods at distribution level, but that visibility stopped at the finished product. The company could identify which products carried the greatest business importance, but not which upstream materials were critical to producing them.

This made it difficult to connect downstream product priorities with production and raw-material dependencies, limiting the company’s ability to identify where supply risks could have the greatest business impact.

Rulex Platform extended the company’s ABC analysis upstream, tracing the importance of finished goods through manufacturing and product structures to the raw materials required for their production. This allowed the company to identify the inputs most critical to its high-value products and focus risk mitigation accordingly.

From product value to material criticality

The analysis started with finished goods at distribution centers, where products were classified as A, B, or C based on volume and profitability to reflect their relative business importance.

Rulex Platform then propagated these classifications upstream through the supply network. Using product quantities and transportation-lane data, it connected finished goods at distribution centers with the manufacturing plants supplying them.

From there, bills of materials (BOMs) were used to trace each finished product back to the raw materials required for its production. This allowed the business importance of downstream products to be reflected in the materials on which they depended.

Rulex Platform then assigned A, B, or C importance levels to raw materials, based on the value of the finished goods they supported. This gave the company a clearer view of which material dependencies represented the greatest business risk.

Teams could therefore identify which high-value finished goods were exposed when critical materials were at risk and prioritize mitigation accordingly, for example by securing alternative suppliers for the most important inputs.

What is ABC analysis?

ABC analysis classifies products or other business resources according to their relative importance, helping organizations focus attention on the items that contribute the greatest value. Rulex Platform supports ABC segmentation within its visual, no-code environment.

Explore ABC analysis in Rulex

Beyond criticality: understand supply exposure

Knowing which raw materials support the most valuable products establishes where material criticality lies. A complementary question is how vulnerable those materials are to supply disruption.

Rulex Platform can start from HML risk at raw-material level and trace its downstream consequences, revealing which finished goods inherit the greatest exposure. This adds a risk perspective to material criticality and helps identify cases where high business value coincides with high supply vulnerability.

Explore Supply Risk Propagation

01. No-code analysis in Rulex Platform

Rulex Platform provides a visual, no-code environment for building data and analytical workflows through configurable drag-and-drop tasks.

Its WYSIWYG approach also lets users work directly with data as they configure and refine each step, making it easier to inspect how information is transformed throughout the process. For material criticality analysis, this provides a practical environment for connecting distribution, manufacturing, BOM, and raw-material data while keeping the analytical flow visible and manageable.

02. Data Agility and supply chain data integration

Rulex Platform can collect and combine information from heterogeneous sources and formats within a common data environment. Its connectivity spans files, databases, cloud storage, and enterprise repositories, allowing different layers of supply chain information to be brought together for analysis.

For material criticality, this provides the data foundation needed to connect information across distribution, manufacturing, transportation lanes, and bills of materials. Relationships that sit in separate datasets can therefore be analyzed as part of the same end-to-end view, linking finished goods with the upstream resources required to produce them.

Frequently asked questions