Operational resilience in industry

01-12-2021 | Posted by Principia

Digitisation, relocation of the supply chain, faster time-to-market and innovation are some of the urgent challenges faced by our country’s industry. How to tackle them?

Resilience has become a fashionable concept. Since it was coined in 1972 by child psychiatrist Michael Rutter, it has been used in many contexts and situations to refer to the ability of a living organism to adapt to adverse events or to a “perturbing agent”.

If we consider companies as living organisms, subject to the dynamics of their constituents, they certainly had to develop resilience over the last couple of years; the society in which they operate has been “perturbed”, putting to the test their tools for facing the new environment.

Large corporations analyse more and more the operational resilience of their suppliers. This is done by the staff in charge of compliance, with ever greater value being assigned to being able to adapt swiftly to changing environments.

Some firms have done it better than others, but the pandemic has shown that our industry, in free fall for several years, is ready for a change and has the will and the talent to achieve it.

How can we improve our adaptability to change in industry?

1. 1. Knowing and analysing the client’s experience with our firm. Observing the process that he goes through and identifying what is important for him and how to improve his relationship with our company.
   2. Understanding the market’s demand and the purchasing tendencies of our clients to be able to offer innovative and efficient solutions, reducing the time-to-market.
   3. Developing a data-based analysis system to take informed decisions in real time.
   4. Evaluating the impact of change in all operations. Errors must be detected and predicted to prevent mistakes before they become serious problems. 
   5. Visualizing real scenarios, using virtual simulations and stress tests of severe but plausible situations.
   6. Setting up the culture of collaboration to manage change successfully, strengthening strategic decision making.
   7. Using collaborative platforms in the cloud to keep all the actors connected in real time and with the same information.

Modernisation and digitisation thus become essential for improving efficiency and to develop processes that make us more competitive in a changing environment, whether because of a pandemic or simply by the evolution of supply and demand.

Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience platform allows working collaboratively in the cloud to simulate and predict virtual scenarios of potentially real situations, whether operational or associated with production or innovation.

At Principia, for over 40 years, we have collaborated with industrial firms to improve their processes and to innovate. And with our experience in the use of the 3DExperience platform, we have helped to enhance operational resilience in numerous industrial sectors.