Next-Generation Manufacturing Processes Are Here to Stay

Industrial machinery and component manufacturers are stretched thin, addressing global challenges like the need for clean energy, smart cities, and a circular economy. In addition, they are confronted with ever more demanding customers and the transformation of their business ecosystem, including customers, partners, and competitors. Innovative industrial machinery and component manufacturers are tackling these challenges by pursuing new business models based monetizing data assets. These companies are embracing new technologies as they focus on strategic priorities to drive digitalization. These strategies are helping them realize their vision.

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Tackling Supply Chain Challenges Head On

The top three challenges most supply chains face are managing complexity, increasing agility and generating value. Managing complexity is the result of customized demand and multi-tier networks of product and service supplies. Additionally, volatile demand, fast-changing market conditions and geopolitical instability test the agility of the supply chain and exposes where it is lacking. This hinders the ability to generate value by changing the perception of the supply chain function from a cost element to a key competitive factor. Luckily there are some capabilities that can help to overcome these hurdles: visibility, collaboration, and data-driven processes. The catch is finding the right tool that can provide these capabilities while proving actionable insight.

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Back to Basics in the Supply Chain

“It is critical to examine the basics of your supply chain before an improvement strategy can be designed and implemented.”

Demanding customers, emerging technologies, global supply bases and ever-changing market landscapes require companies to continuously adjust their supply chains to stay competitive. Most supply chain executives find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle where every new or newer technology presents the solution that the previous versions could not address. To break the cycle, rather than reaching for the latest technologies, some managers have gone back to basics and have emerged with lasting return and a competitive advantage.

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Retailers Must Prepare for the Next-Generation of Customers

“The changing landscape across today’s retail and consumer industries has resulted in a rapid rise of emerging technologies, especially when it comes to automation and artificial intelligence. Retail is one of the sectors to already implement and invest in cognitive and AI technologies, resulting in new and unexpected offerings for consumers and shoppers around the world.”

As the next generation of customers expects brands to provide unmatched experiential design and functionality across multiple interfaces, retaining customer loyalty requires retailers and manufacturers to implement cognitive, automated services while still remaining transparent and secure.

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New Business Models Promote an Evolving Supply Chain

Advanced technology solutions are not only reducing costs in the supply chain but can also increase revenue. Cost, efficiency, effectiveness, productivity are critically important for any company building and managing their digital supply chain, but business leaders are trying to leverage supply chain excellence as a differentiator that generates new revenue. The idea of mastering the supply chain- from source to production to the customer and back again, enables businesses to do new things that set themselves apart from the competition.

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How Global Volatility and AI Will Impact Your Supply Chain

Managing geopolitical risk has always been a part of procurement and supply management’s job, but as new sources of supply volatility emerge and the threat of tariff escalations increase, managing these risks has become critical. In an environment of overall declining prices in technology industry, driving cost reduction has been the relatively straightforward and the standard measure of procurement success. Volatile markets have shaken the assumption behind slow but consistent cost reductions however, and many electronic manufacturers will need to shift their goal to ensuring continuity of supply and perhaps limiting price increases. With the rise of supply chain analytics and new technologies paving the way for supply chains, it is critical to be prepared for what is to come.

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Strategies for Developing Customer-Focused Digital Distribution Channels

Companies increasingly use digital technologies to bypass distributors and enter into direct relationships with their end-users. These relationships can create efficient new sales channels and powerful feedback mechanisms or unlock entirely new business models. But they also risk alienating the longstanding partners that companies count on for their core business. Executive leaders understand the potential of a reinvented distribution strategy but are often unclear on how to proceed. While the opportunity is compelling, so is the potential to upset existing distribution partners and thereby damage the core business. To minimize the risk associated with this transition, there are three strategies for developing a digital distribution approach.

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Tools For An Effective Supply Chain Strategy

Today’s supply chains are increasingly complex, driving logistics operations to invest in systems that can drive efficiency rather than hindering it. Forward-thinking supply chain professionals are looking to advanced technologies to streamline processes, improve accuracy, accelerate delivery and reduce costs. Complex supply chains generate more data, which companies can use to drive greater efficiency or engage in innovation that disrupts an entire industry. The prospect of using data to operate more efficiently and/or innovate is behind the catalyst toward digital transformation that leaders across every industry now pursue.

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Train Your Supply Chain to be Dynamic

The very nature of the supply chain is that it’s constantly subject to change, whether that change comes internally (new products, new technology, new management) or externally (regulations, disruptions, competition). There’s also now compelling evidence that the workforce itself is being changed by this continuous influx of new-ness. Due to the shift in consumer buying habits to an omni-channel/”always-on” model focused on immediate gratification, shippers find themselves stretched in every direction. They recognize the need for greater agility, but many haven’t made the required changes to improve their agility over the past five years.

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