The Industry Renaissance is emerging worldwide and it’s encompassing new categories of processes, services and technology: new solutions are being created to meet the growing consumer’s demands, new online ecosystems are being formed to connect industrial services with suppliers, and the real and virtual worlds are merging to shape the digital twin of products. Furthermore, the manufacturers are changing their manufacturing paradigm from mass production to mass personalization. This also brings a big shift in marketing from a product-centric to a customer value and experience model. Therefore, for manufacturers to stay ahead of the competition, they must act now and transform their value networks both internally and externally that is merging the real and the virtual worlds of their products and creating more flexible supply chain network, respectively.

The new value networks go way beyond the traditional product lifecycle and linear supply chain models. By breaking down the barriers between industrial trading partners, producers and makers, a new business model for delivering sustainable innovations to customers is forming. New technology is allowing companies to work in both the real and the virtual world, making it much easier for manufacturers to replicate and modify product designs and the manufacturing processes. By collaborating internally and identifying best partners for each task, manufacturers can succeed in meeting their time-to-market and achieve a higher profit margin.

Marketplaces matches manufacturers with suppliers

This new way of value creation brings together supply and demand, the global and the local. Marketplaces help match manufacturers with suppliers and giving them access to both their preselected suppliers as well as an extended ecosystem for industrial services. These places allow companies to identify and quickly leverage past successes by offering a streamlined cross-functional and cross-organizational collaboration and sharing of best practices.

The 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace provides manufacturers, regardless of their size and location with access to on-demand manufacturing with an intelligent part of sourcing services, and at the same time participate to in a global value network from one single point of contact. It will enable streamlined collaborations and an overall innovation process, uniquely remove technology barriers for design and manufacturing, and offer the possibility to manage a wide variety of actors, as well as benchmark performance among different factories with full traceability.

Competitors become partners

Current and new manufacturers are no longer tied and bound to an existing set of suppliers as has been in the traditional supply chain. This opens up for new approaches where cooperation with other trading partners and suppliers, who were traditionally competing, can deliver dynamic value, agility and speed.

The new possibilities to improve operational performance (with agile and efficient practices) also come with the benefit of minimizing risk across the supply chain. Furthermore, by combining the power of machines and people and using both big data and human knowledge, manufacturers can now obtain a smart and optimal manufacturing system.

For example, you can quickly and easily switch to a new supplier, or location, when launching a new product if your current supplier should encounter any type of problems e.g. making a plant inoperable. Using traditional methods this would often be impossible but now this can become be a reality thank to the marketplaces and new value network.

Continuous improvements and innovation

Today, you can easily pull data from your business systems and virtually run “what if” scenarios around your operating costs and price erosion. This allows you to shift your manufacturing strategy and operations thus maximizing your margins. By managing business processes and functions through a digital and unified platform, you can create a basis for collaborative problem solving and continuous improvements across your enterprise. In return, this creates more control and established collaboration paths.

With the real-time integration with shop-floor equipment to monitor performance and capture information provided by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform you can identify issues through root cause analysis quickly and efficiently. By modeling in the 3DEXPERIENCE twin there is also room for continuous improvement and innovation in terms of product design, creating more streamlined manufacturing processes and ultimately increased customer satisfaction. With the ability to run different tests and simulations you can make sure your products are manufactured right first time, and it is done perfectly every time.

Companies who embrace the Industry Renaissance and modify their business models accordingly will have the advantage of being able to transform the way they manufacture by using their value network – ultimately being able to meet market demands and most importantly being able to deliver unique experiences to their customers.