Industry Insights: Supply Chain Solutions and Opportunities

The concept of “supply chain management” has been known for decades but the ability to effectively implement a strategy that meets business goals has been continually challenged, especially since the start of the global pandemic. The unprecedented disruption has shone a spotlight on critical weaknesses that need to be addressed. In this article, we’ll take a deeper look into the weaknesses that are becoming more prevalent and how companies can look to overcome these with supply chain solutions from DELMIA. 

Supply Chain of the future

Supply Chain Challenges in Focus

• SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE: Even mature organizations were caught off guard. Shortages of materials, people and demand led to a complete breakdown of the supply chain in many cases.  
• RELIANCE ON EXTENDED NETWORKS: With very few truly vertically integrated supply chains, global organizations suddenly found that overseas supply and manufacturing were suddenly cut off leaving them starved of critical components and assemblies.  
• DISRUPTION AS A CONSTANT: Although minor disruption is perpetual, potential “compounding” disruption was not anticipated. The pandemic impact was historic but adding events like the blockage in the Suez Canal and Brexit is exaggerating the challenges, and others will follow.  
• LACK OF VISIBILITY: Knowing where you are and what is happening across the supply chain in real-time is needed to know how to try and course correct. Very few companies had visibility to the overall operational status in order to effectively develop a contingency plan with any confidence. 

Key Capabilities required to drive the Supply Chain of the Future

The supply chain and logistics industry must rebuild from a strategic level – to thrive and progress from a digital standpoint to overcome the challenges of disruption. In order to do this, there are some key capabilities which organizations will need to leverage: 

• WORKFORCE DIGITALIZATION: Ensure better worker engagement with a real-time work-shift scheduling system, simplified digital procedures, and optimized workforce planning.  
• BIG DATA AND AI-DRIVEN PREDICTIONS: Achieve accurate predictions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to mitigate challenges effectively, avert costly consequences and maintain best practices.  
• ROBOTIC PROCESSES AND AUTOMATION: Apply robotics processes and intelligent automation to routine manual work for higher efficiency, lower costs and a safer working environment. By digitalizing value networks from end to end, logistics companies can gain full visibility into their operations, acquire the ability to integrate and synchronize their activities to deliver faster, manage more efficiently, mitigate risks effectively and run nimble business practices.  
• VIRTUAL TWIN: Simulate what-if scenarios to identify improvement and growth areas, find cost-saving opportunities and plan route optimization to deliver excellent customer experience at speed and scale.  
• REAL-TIME COLLABORATION: Leverage real-time data and visibility across value networks for better collaboration, speed and more accurate decision-making to ensure deliveries are made on time and in full. 

By digitalizing value networks from end to end, logistics companies can gain full visibility into their operations, acquire the ability to integrate and synchronize their activities to deliver faster, manage more efficiently, mitigate risks effectively and run nimble business practices. 

Drive Supply Chain Success with DELMIA 

Organizations must not only survive disruption—they must also thrive and innovate. Agility and resiliency are two fundamental competencies that all future supply chains need to achieve. 

DELMIA offers robust supply chain solutions that can help organizations in different industries to address the challenges and problems to operate with greater agility, efficiency and operational excellence. DELMIA provides planning, scheduling and optimization for complex business processes within the supply chain, logistics and workforce operations across all planning horizons. 

Key features from the DELMIA solution for supply chain management:

• END-TO-END SUPPLY CHAIN MODELING: DELMIA Planning & Optimization provides optimized planning for operations execution across your entire value network. Taking a holistic but modular approach, DELMIA enables intelligent supply chain planning and optimization for every stage of your supply chain journey and time horizon. Tactical supply chain issues can often be the root cause of missing major business goals: single supplier shortages leading to production delays or key workforce disruptions delaying product distribution. It’s important to model all aspects of the supply chain as the details matter. 
• BUSINESS-BASED OUTCOMES: Efficiency is more than throughput and can be quite complex. It’s about being able to model and optimize the right mix in your operations and supply chain network to maximize efficiency based on different business metrics and ever-changing constraints. As business metrics, such as sustainability, become higher priorities, planning must evolve to include these as an integrated part of supply chain planning. 
• WORLD-CLASS OPTIMIZATION AND ANALYTICS: Recognized as the leading company in optimization technology, DELMIA provides world record-breaking optimization to drive the best course of action in your operations on a continuous basis, which directly translates to increased efficiency, asset utilization and ROI. DELMIA offers a broad set of industry standards and proprietary optimization technologies and experience to optimize your world and provide the right level of automation. 

The path to supply chain innovation is available now for organizations that are seeking new answers and solutions to today’s challenges and disruptions. With DELMIA, it is possible to start taking steps to build foundational processes and infrastructure within critical areas of business, from high-level supply chain strategy to manufacturing, logistics and for workforce planning. 

We are here to support organizations with their major supply chain initiatives:

• Enabling sustainable business operations by optimizing critical resources, people and energy 
• Building resilient supply chains by empowering companies to confidently plan and react instantly to disruptions  
• Achieving business-based outcomes by optimizing financial and corporate goals 

Get in touch today to find out more.