What is the most important way a company can help supply chain resilience so it has a positive impact on the business? What are Top-Performing companies doing differently than others? How important are autonomous systems and artificial intelligence (AI)? What does the transformation of supply chain planning entail?
Read this new survey-based eBook to find out more about what really matters most to resilience. Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes DELMIA (registration required).
Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Supply Chain Challenges Persist
- Supply Chain Resilience
- Resilience: Improving Business Results
- Factors in Positive Supply Chain Impact
- Visibility into Production
- Visibility into Product Changes
- People in the Planning Process
- Technology Hurdles
- Integrating Software Applications
- Technologies for Planning
- AI and Autonomous Support
- Plan Cadence and Structure
- Investing in Resilience
- Drivers for Resilience
- Benefits from Investing
- Redefining Planning Scope
- Recommendations
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
Transforming to Succeed
Every manufacturer has suffered supply chain challenges in the past few years. Thus, supply chain resilience is top of mind but takes work to achieve. What needs to change is typically the scope and focus of planning.
This research shows that transforming and expanding the thinking, team, and processes to achieve resilience in planning can have significant business benefits.
Top Performers’ View
In this survey of 229 manufacturers, Top Performers show the way. These Top Performers are defined by superior performance on business metrics around new products, revenue, profit, and time to market.
Best Practices
Top Performers’ planning is far more likely to involve the entire organization and its data. Not just sourcing, planning, scheduling, and logistics from the supply chain discipline but also product design, process engineering, and manufacturing. The involvement of these disciplines in planning is the #1 factor for Top Performers’ supply chains positively impacting the business. Top Performers are significantly more likely to cite this factor, so it’s a differentiator in what they do. (See chart)
Resilience is an Attainable Initiative
The good news is that internal collaboration and visibility to data from internal manufacturing and engineering groups is a resilience initiative any company can undertake. To succeed with such a program, manufacturers need software that supports a broad-based planning process transformation. Capabilities such as a common data platform and multi-discipline collaboration are crucial to success.
Investing Delivers Benefits
Companies that invest in transformation for resilience are seeing the benefits. This research shows that the longer you invest, the more likely you are to see benefits. Top Performers provide a blueprint for where to focus investment, who to involve, and what to expect from this transformation
Visibility into Production
Capabilities Change
After collaboration, visibility is the next most important factor in achieving positive supply chain impacts on the business. Manufacturers typically have continuous improvement programs that regularly boost production capabilities. Every time there is such a change, the basis of the supply chain plans should shift.
Hole in the Center
While manufacturing or “make” sits at the center of the supply chain, many companies do not have good visibility into production. The plant floor has often been described as a “black hole” for information flow: it goes in but does not come out readily.
Challenges Seeing Manufacturing Clearly
- People: Plant floor people have wanted their systems separate to ensure maximum uptime to support ongoing production.
- Process: Production can change minute-to-minute, so understanding what’s relevant and creating a pipeline appropriate to each planning cadence is dynamic.
- Technology: Separate systems with incompatible data formats and levels of granularity or detail abound in plants. Adding appropriate context for production data to be useful in supply chain planning is a common challenge, along with the need for a uniform data platform.
Redefining Planning Scope
Breadth of Operations
For resilience, supply chain planning must transform and expand to ALL operations. Aligning within supply chain based on every aspect, from product specs to production capabilities, is crucial. That means integration of this data must be complete and as seamless as possible. Processes also need to involve all of these disciplines fully.
Collaboration
What appears to make the most difference in supply chain resilience is involving the right people. Collaboration between supply chain, manufacturing engineering, production operations, and product design is a top priority for resilience. Planning processes must be inclusive; ideally, technology will support this effort.
Technology Support Scope
Many companies will need to make technology investments to plan based on this scope. Based on these survey results, manufacturers need visibility, data access and normalization, and an enterprise collaboration platform. Digital twins of the supply chain, products, and production processes that enable the virtual and real to stay in sync even through extreme volatility could play a significant role
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes DELMIA (registration required).
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us.