In Part I, Maintaining Manufacturing Business Continuity and Collaboration in an Era of COVID-19 Disruption we discussed how the COVID-19 pandemic has brought manufacturing to the intersection of two trends:
- Collaboration in a work-from-home environment
- Emerging market opportunities within the healthcare space
To capitalize on those trends, manufacturers can benefit significantly from a manufacturing collaboration platform that:
- Addresses the shortcomings of existing remote-work tools
- Overcomes global supply chain disruption
- Facilitates the production shift from non-essential to essential products
- Delivers the agility and robustness necessary to maintain productivity—particularly with the potential of seesawing between shelter-in-place mandates and traditional office environments—over the course of who knows how long?
If you’re like many business owners or managers, you’re asking yourself: “What do I need to do to keep moving my business forward during this global disruption? Is it possible to manufacture something entirely different, using the shop and tools that I have, in a market that has changed significantly—and with much of my staff working remotely?” Here’s how a collaboration platform can help you get there:
- Embracing the new reality of collaboration in the virtual office environment: Rather than a cobbled-together group of various communications tools, a purpose-built digital collaboration platform will improve the quality and efficiency of project management, software, and product design, and manufacturing—breaking down walls where necessary, and linking silos seamlessly.
- Rethinking the supply chain: Over the short term, this means:
- Adopting automation and integration technology with advanced planning and scheduling to anticipate plant capacity requirements minimize interruption of supply. Manufacturers like Speed Group have reduced their stock by 27%, increasing productivity by 18% and reducing waste by 35%.
- Increasing the use of Virtual 3D Plant and Operation simulation to test retooling scenarios quickly. Virtual simulation helped Lochomach, an aircraft provider in Sweden, to drastically reduce the time associated with the shimming process, improved the cost-efficiency of composite structural part assembly, and enhanced human safety, ergonomics, and feasibility.
- Identifying secondary and digital marketplaces for alternative sourcing of suppliers. The 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace helps designers across the world to easily manufacture, find standard parts or hire temporary engineering, anywhere, anytime.
- Incorporating digital additive manufacturing for lower volume components. The tools within the DELMIA and SIMULIA brands on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform can easily make this a reality and provide a seamless process integration into most 3D Printers.
- Employing cloud and managed services to reduce IT cost and reduce risk, while improving service availability.
Over the long term, future steps to prepare your industrial company to prosper in an era of uncertainty could include:
- Launching (or re-launching) your Digital Twin/Digital Thread initiative: allowing your teams to constantly innovate and improve new products no matter where they are located geographically, using any internet-connected device, anywhere and any time.
- Adopting a cross-discipline approach with PLM-MOM-Digital Twin: ensuring you can rapidly shift manufacturing and operations wherever resources are available, maximizing your ability to respond quickly to market conditions, taking market share in the process.
- Rethinking core competencies and assets: applying your PLM, model-based design, simulation, and digital manufacturing competencies to quickly shift production to affinity products that are needed now. Re-use of models, designs and current capabilities can accelerate this shift, and MES/MOM can be incorporated to re-purpose producing capacity, materials, assets, etc.
3DEXPERIENCE Platform Collaboration Benefits
If you’re currently struggling with a hodgepodge of email and IM to Slack, Zoom, WebEx and Microsoft Teams, you’re not alone—and let’s face it, those tools are leaving you short when it comes to complex design.
In contrast, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform has been purpose-built for manufacturers, helping you meet the acute needs for remote collaboration during the continually changing circumstances resulting from COVID-19.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides software solutions for practically every organization in your company—from marketing to sales to engineering—that help you, in your value-creation process, to create differentiating consumer experiences. Here are a few of the advantages:
- Single, easy-to-use interface: The 3DEXPERIENCE platform powers Industry Solution Experiences and Industry Process Experiences based on 3D design, analysis, simulation, and intelligence software in a collaborative, interactive environment.
- CAD aware: As the industry’s only CAD-aware business experience platform, it ensures that you can maintain the one version of the truth with your CAD data whatever the origin. Robust interactivity—tracking and synchronizing changes in real-time—helps avoid the quality, performance, and productivity issues of not having the most up-to-date information.
- Fast implementation: With the 3DEXPERIENCE cloud-based solution, your company can be up and running in hours
- Inexpensive: Trial and Starter packages are available for startups and mid-sized businesses
- Immediately scalable: No matter how many licenses you begin with, your user base can quickly grow with you as your needs do.
- Re-compose your supply chain: You get immediate access to 200+ suppliers and 300+ qualified component configurations on the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace, plus alternative manufacturing options like Additive Manufacturing.
Add it all up, and 3DEXPERIENCE is an inexpensive and cloud-based business platform that not only ensures your business continuity and ability to execute today but also builds in the speed and agility to make more informed decisions—even with a remote workforce contributing from different locations.
Interested in learning more? Join the webinar “Gaining Control of Your Business in Times of Unprecedented Disruption” with Persistent’s Michael McKittrick and Lewis Breeding as they discuss how Collaborative Product Development on the Cloud will help your business to go on.
Written By: Lewis Breeding, Michael McKittrick and Jose Pena from Persistent Systems.
