What is Irving Shipbuilding doing to address Supply Chain Troubles? Artificial Intelligence

Irving Shipbuilding is in the news again, but not for bad reasons

The Ottawa Citizen reported this week that the cost of two Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships (AOPS) for the Canadian Coast Guard jumped by $500 million to $2.1 billion in the past year. This is part of a steady roll of bad press for the AOPS and Irving Shipbuilding over the last few years as costs have steadily risen for building the 8 AOPS. Public Services and Procurement Canada and Irving Shipbuilding have said the increased costs are a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher than anticipated inflation, a “more mature Coast Guard vessel design,” and more. The Conservative Party has quickly taken up the news as another reason to criticize the current Liberal government for the decisions of the previous Conservative government, saying that costs are “out of control” and “no one seems to care.”

Alas, I am not here to add to this discussion at all but recommend reading the work of Jeff Collins for naval procurement analysis. Instead, I am interested in something that seemed to fly under the radar yesterday, which was a press release from Interos about its new multi-year contract with Irving Shipbuilding to “expand resilience.” Specifically, Irving Shipbuilding has partnered with Interos to support supply-chain resiliency and through visibility and risk monitoring using artificial intelligence.

Intero provides a risk monitoring platform which uses artificial intelligence to track multiple levels of risks including finance, cyber, regulatory, geopolitical, catastrophe, ESG, and more. Most of all, the press release states that the supply chain risk intelligence will specifically support the National Shipbuilding Strategy, including the AOPS.

Sweetening the deal for Irving, the partnership with Interos also includes COTA Aviation to support supply chain diversity. This partnership is also bolstering their industrial and technological benefits (ITB) commitments as is COTA Aviation an indigenous-owned aerospace and defense firm based in British Columbia that offers a wide range of services from engineering to training. The addition of COTA Aviation in the partnership appears to be a multi-prong effort on behalf of Irving to understand its supply chain and associated risks using Interos’ AI-supported risk intelligence platform with COTA Aviation to help operationalize and manage the diversification of supply chains using Interos’ platform.

Though what I am ultimately left with is wondering to what degree is it a coincidence that this partnership was announced the same day that the Ottawa Citizen article came out?