The “cloud” effect on the supply chain: resilience
09-03-2021 | Posted by Principia
From the business point of view, particularly in industrial firms, COVID-19 has brought to the surface many shortcomings previously buried under a coat of apparent efficiency.
Take supply chains, for example, more or less traditional, more or less advanced. Many of them are based on aggressive lean models that put the pressure on the suppliers. But with a horizon of strictly supplying just-in-time for production, they have faltered under the conditions they had to endure. And if everybody is lacking one part, when no one has it, then nobody can produce.
One of the words that became fashionable during the pandemic is resilience, understood as the toughness to maintain the continuity of operations in adverse conditions.
What we have seen is that supply chains were not as resilient as expected and, in a context in which uncertainty is widespread, most of them, based on the accuracy of our estimates to increase productivity, were not effective and that led to interruptions in supply and production.
As in many other cases, the answer comes with the use of collaborative platforms on cloud. Through them, companies can exchange information faster and more flexibly, while also allowing being in more than one chain. Limitations are less radical in the digital world and the link with PLM (product life management) allows a safe and efficient collaboration between the various actors. The platform 3DEXPERIENCE on Cloud of Dassault Systèmes includes, besides an implicit PLM system, a new data architecture that makes possible a real-time collaboration between the different departments.
Platforms on cloud improve visibility along the complete supply chain, not just one segment, and can optimise resilience against potential disruptive events. They allow acting, both proactively and reactively, because they evaluate risks far more accurately.
Scale is a key factor for the success of these models and for the collaboration of the numerous companies (for example, all the Tier-n in a given chain) that have to share huge amounts of data about the life cycle management of the products, something simply impossible without using platforms on cloud.
The supply chain concept that emerges after the pandemic goes beyond the traditional one and encompasses everything from conception and design to post-sales services. Thus, the use of 3DEXPERIENCE on Cloud as a platform to communicate, collaborate and share data by all the actors involved is not just key to shorten commercialisation times, reduce costs and improve service quality, but also to foresee and act upon the events that might affect their stability.
