If you are an OEM or Tier 1 manufacturer, your supply chain is almost certainly becoming leaner and must adapt to a much faster pace. At the same time, your products are growing more complex and business considerations force you to focus increasingly on core competences and outsource non-core activities. Typically you have hundreds of suppliers, manage thousands of parts and operate several global factories. In order to deliver high-quality products, your supply chain requires to be well-engineered and professionally constructed. Regardless of whether you are an OEM or Tier 1 manufacturer, you understand that your operations need to be demand-driven and that you must increasingly take supply chain collaboration into account in your end-to-end collaboration strategy.

Key supply chain challenges in Discrete Manufacturing

• Control the balance between inbound, production and outbound processes.
• Streamline processes with suppliers in spite of different volumes and IT maturity.
• Improve collaboration between engineering, procurement, operations and finance.
• Manage impact of disruptions or changes in parts distribution.
• Lean supply chain collaboration with automated B2B processes.
• Reduce (safety) stock and manage supply chain risks with better visibility.
• Improve Return on Net Assets (RONA) and initiate early supplier collaboration.
• Provide full tracking and tracing for all critical parts in the Bill of Materials.
• Integrate transport requirements into your production schedules.
• Manage accurate collaboration processes in a single and accessible interface.

Engineer to Order, Make to Order, Make to Stock

Engineer to Order and Make to Order supply chains rely heavily on a responsive and collaborative trading partner base, particularly in the case of key suppliers. They act more like supply networks than "command-and-control" supply chains. Sophisticated collaboration options that adequately respond to the collaboration requirements of both your suppliers and your own company in a "give-to-get" way of working are more important than contracts, terms and prices. Your organization can benefit from our experience here as we have implemented and adopted the best supply chain collaboration practices used by leading sectors in this area such as aerospace, defence and high-tech.

In Make to Stock supply chains there is typically more volume, a greater velocity and an emphasis on flawless execution and early detection of disruptions. Performance is often managed via a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with penalties and deadlines. The best practices in this area are more mature and we offer proven techniques, scorecards and dashboards that allow you to effectively manage your make to stock process.

Procure to Pay landscape

Discrete Manufacturing Industries typically rely heavily on effective collaboration within their procure to pay environment. Our customers generally operate multiple plants, trade with hundreds of suppliers, manage thousands of different part numbers and apply either order-based or call-off based replenishment processes. They need an efficient collaboration platform between their internal systems and external processes and systems that may differ by individual supplier/factory combination due to acquisition legacies and specialization. However their suppliers' capabilities, order volumes and order frequencies are very diverse. Companies of this type use our Procure to Pay SaaS solution to decouple their internal processes from the processes operated by external partners and create a common denominator.

The benefits of our Procure to Pay solution:

• Engineering and manufacturing specifications for Purchase Orders.
• Change management for Orders (delivery time, quantity, price, specification).
• Share forecast information to identify expected demand and capacity requirements.
• Just in time/ sequence parts delivery with goods dispatch, labels and barcodes.
• Efficient self-billing processes.
• Visual VMI tools to enable suppliers to manage fulfilment objectives.
• Supplier scorecards to measure performance against target and the peer group.

Order to Cash Landscape

If you are an OEM, you will probably define collaboration in your order to cash landscape differently to a tier 1 manufacturer. As an OEM, you are responsible for supply chain orchestration and you initiate and manage coordination processes. Collaborating with customers is important: you need to align your supply chain to changes in demand from wholesalers and distributors or your direct sales organization. Depending on the forms of partnership, you may need to deploy a wide range of collaboration and integration techniques. Our Order to Cash SaaS solution allows you to support all of these channels from a single collaboration platform.

If you are a Tier 1 manufacturer, you probably serve a number of OEM customers that typically manage a supply chain as described above. Instead of orchestrating the process, you need to be able to react flexibly and adapt seamlessly to dynamic production schedules and changes in demand from your customers while ensuring efficient internal processes. Our Order to Cash SaaS solution allows you to link demand and supply effectively on a single collaboration platform.

The benefits of our Order to Cash solution:

• End-to-end inventory visibility throughout the supply chain.
• Improved sales with accurate forecasts, production orders and purchase orders.
• Ability to alert customers proactively on a management-by-exception basis.
• Improved responsiveness with Supply Chain Event Management capabilities.
• Electronic collaboration and integration with multiple customers in multiple formats.
• Improved cost leadership, efficiency and become "easy to work with".

e-Logistics Landscape

If you are active in discrete manufacturing, transportation and warehousing is typically not your core business. These processes are generally outsourced to logistic service providers. Even so, this industry is characterized by multiple collaboration scenarios:

1. Suppliers arrange transport and deliver duty-paid, however you face the challenge of tracking your parts and identifying a realistic delivery date to your site after the goods have left the supplier's factory.
2. Manufacturers buy on ex-works delivery terms and instruct regional or global LSPs to collect the goods, possibly carry out value-added activities on their behalf and then deliver on a JIT basis.
3. Customers request manufacturers to arrange shipping, but at the same time require detailed ASN information and impose slot booking.

Flexibility is therefore crucial: you need to avoid dependency on a Logistic Service Provider for your collaboration information and integration needs in the supply chain. Our e-Logistics solution offer this degree of flexibility.

The benefits of our e-Logistics solution:

• Inbound goods are labelled with your bar codes.
• Send shipping notices to 3PL to initiate pick-up and create Transport Orders.
• Improved tracking and tracing to identify possible impacts on production schedules.
• Generate LSP scorecards and dashboards based on the SLA and KPIs.
• Ability to interface with customs brokers and other third parties.
• Ability to easily match carriers' invoices to the services they have supplied.