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 and innovation

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.

Four 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 with DELMIA

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.

Build the supply chain of the future today

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.

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