Empowering the Supply Chain of the Future

I’m passionate about computing, technology and engineering, and keen to contribute towards sustainable operations. Dassault Systèmes’ vision of harmonizing product, nature and life greatly resonated with me. In partnership with the organization, I aspire to challenge, envision and shape the digital ecosystem to reimagine product and business lifecycles for more sustainable and future-proof operations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities in supply chains. Resilience, flexibility, agility and innovation emerge as the defining characteristics of the supply chain of the organizations that minimized the impact of these disruptions or achieved faster recovery.

The objective of this article is to explore how innovation and resilience are cornerstones to the growth of industrial organizations amid such challenging circumstances. Further, we highlight how Dassault Systèmes DELMIA’s ecosystem of advanced digital technologies can help transform supply chains for more sustainable operations and impact, and enable companies to unlock the next wave of productivity increase.

Digital empowers supply chain resilience

Supply chains have grown in size and complexity in response to dynamically evolving customer preferences, complex portfolios, globalization and more. A natural consequence of this is the increased risk of exposure to disruptions (such as the impact of the pandemic, or the blockage of the Suez Canal). Additionally, the size and complexity make it challenging to innovate at scale.

Digitization helps companies rise to this challenge, integrating organizational processes both horizontally (across functions) and vertically (across value chain), and further aligning physical and financial flows with information flow. This provides transparency, insight, and consequently, control over business KPIs.

Advanced digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML), analytics platforms, simulation, etc., enable invaluable competitive advantage and foresight: intelligent decision-making to achieve favorable business outcomes for anticipated future scenarios. Digital thus empowers more sustainable operations and innovations.

4 Clusters of disruptive digital technologies

We believe these four clusters of digital technologies will enable the end-to-end digitization of supply chains:

• Commodity IoT sensors to connect/exchange data with other systems over communication networks, providing transparency and an accurate, granular overview of the network for efficient management of processes, assets and people.

• More data, faster processors and cloud computing, and access to advanced algorithms to derive insight, model, analyze and make accurate predictions to provide flexibility and efficiency.

• Robotics, cobotics, business process management and robotic process automation, image recognition, natural language processing and conversational automation to automate physical and non-physical processes for faster, efficient processing.

• Analytics platforms to combine disparate IT and OT data sources into a single system and enable performance management reporting to allow strategic overview to top management, and facilitate ad-hoc problem solving by frontline staff.

The synergy between these digital technologies provides an accurate, granular view of the whole network, with enhanced transparency, enabling flexibility, efficiency and quick, collaborative decision-making. These are the attributes of a resilient and innovative supply chain, and we, at DELMIA, can help you achieve this.

Reimagine product development and operations

DELMIA is uniquely positioned to provide an end-to-end virtual representation of your supply chain — from Research & Development, design and operations to sales and product retirement—to ensure perfect planning in the virtual world before execution commences in the real world. This allows organizations to manufacture and operate right-first-time, maximize efficiency and reduce costs.

Powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, DELMIA delivers cutting-edge digital technologies that remove common roadblocks to digital adoption, accelerate the digitization of the entire supply chain and help you realize sustainable impact through innovation and resilience.

Building the supply chain of the future

DELMIA provides the strategic and technological support to design the digital supply chain of the future. By providing a real-time, virtual representation of the entire value network, intelligent decision-making capabilities through advanced digital technologies and a single source of truth via the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we help our customers achieve impact through complete visibility, control and agility. This drives better, faster decision-making, increasing operational resilience and the potential to innovate. Thus, Dassault Systèmes DELMIA enables more sustainable operations capable of harmonizing product, nature and life, and helps you solve the industrial challenges of today and beyond.

If you are interested in learning more about digital technologies and precisely how Dassault Systèmes DELMIA can help transform your supply chain to unlock the next wave of productivity improvement, I encourage you to read our latest eBook.

It’s written for supply chain leaders, illustrating how digital technologies underpin resilience, innovation and sustainability, and the opportunities they can tap into for future-proof operations. Additionally, it includes customer impact stories on the use of these digital technologies. For example, how our machine learning solution helped a global beverage company save $8 million on sourcing costs and how our digital twin helped an aluminum manufacturer reduce 8k–10k ton in inventory.

What is the DELMIA vision for the supply chain of the future?

The DELMIA vision for the Supply Chain of the Future places digitalization at the forefront. This creates an integrated business strategy that incorporates emerging technologies, improves human decision-making, streamlines asset and inventory management, and accelerates competitive advantage.

The 3DEXPERIENCE® platform bring this vision to life by consolidating all information on a digital platform that serves as a single source of truth—and by providing orchestrated decision support for integrated business planning and operations. With real-time visibility across the supply chain, stakeholders are empowered to make well-informed decisions and respond quickly to mitigate disruption. This creates a sustainable foundation for an agile and resilient Supply Chain of the Future.

To start your journey, there are five pillars that can leverage the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to transform your business model and create new value-generating opportunities.

#1: Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)

Companies that still rely heavily on legacy S&OP systems are often bogged down by departmental silos across their organization. Fragmented information limits a planner’s ability to forecast demand and supply, preventing an organization from delivering optimal results.

With the 3DEXPERIENCE Sales and Operations Planning solution, organizations can:

• Unlock real-time end-to-end visibility over the supply chain
• Eliminate silos to enable all stakeholders to collaborate in planning
• Optimize operational planning to drive improved financial results
• Optimize fulfillment of customer demand and reduce inventory
• Minimize risk by planning resilient supply chains that respond to disruption with agility

#2: Production Scheduling

Many moving parts must be taken into consideration when planning an optimized schedule. A manual scheduling process can be overwhelming and prone to human error—leading to task duplication, bottlenecks, late deliveries, as well as material and operational waste that can quickly rack up unwanted costs.

With 3DEXPERIENCE Production Scheduling organizations can:

• Replace manual, error-prone scheduling processes with automated digital ones
• Reduce hours dedicated to planning and shift focus towards value-added tasks
• Minimize errors and create optimal schedules
• Easy identification and mitigation of potential bottlenecks
• Improve production capacity through optimized utilization of assets

#3: Transportation & Logistics Planning

Inefficient logistics plans—both within the supply chain as well as in last-mile delivery—can translate to missed cost-saving opportunities. Organizations need an agile and responsive planning solution that can quickly generate optimized transportation plans within various constraints in order to overcome unforeseen disruption.

With 3DEXPERIENCE Transportation & Logistics Planning, organizations can:

• Gain real-time visibility over all available transport assets and drivers
• Consider all constraints in logistics planning, including regulatory compliance
• Create optimized logistics plans that reduce lead times
• Maximize order fulfillment to drive profitability
• Create efficient transportation plans to minimize carbon emissions
• Respond to disruptions with agility to mitigate risk

#4: Workforce Planning

Relying on manual workforce planning processes makes it difficult to create the most efficient plans and can lead to oversight of safety regulations in some cases. Organizations need a digital planning solution that can consider all constraints and create optimal work schedules to empower their workforce to perform better.

With 3DEXPERIENCE Workforce Planning, organizations can:

• Automatically consider labor rules and safety regulations
• Easily match the right employees, equipment and tasks
• Plan their work schedules strategically to maximize capacity
• Drive improved work quality, speed and satisfaction for both employees and customers

#5: Operations Execution

Failing to embrace digital transformation in shop floor operations is what limits many manufacturers from achieving their true potential. The usage of IIoT technology feeds crucial real-time data that can help organizations optimize operational performance and respond to unplanned events with agility.

With 3DEXPERIENCE Operations Execution, organizations can:

• Leverage IIoT visibility to make improvements to shop floor operations in real time
• Orchestrate operational processes flawlessly in accordance with production plans
• Respond to unplanned events with agility to minimize downtime
• Analyze data on operational performance for continuous optimization

The DELMIA vision for the Supply Chain of the Future places digitalization at the forefront. This creates an integrated business strategy that incorporates emerging technologies, improves human decision-making, streamlines asset and inventory management, and accelerates competitive advantage.

Explore the Supply Chain of the Future virtually. Enter here.