Marico

The market environment is changing very fast leading to a much higher variability at demand level as well as quicker and faster changes to meet growing consumer expectations. Companies are required to build agile and flexible supply chains to be more responsive to these changes. “Interestingly, there are some changes in the environment such as IoT, computing technologies and seamless system integrations, which are taking place simultaneously, that help to overcome some of these new challenges. Seamless integration of the entire value chain wherein the consumer demand triggers information flow back to production shop floor enables changes in resource planning on real time basis,” says Mahajan. This necessitates changes in shop floor design to bring in more flexibility, quicker changeovers and lower lead times without compromising on scale led efficiencies. IoT and shop floor automation have played a significant role in helping achieve this objective.

Smart manufacturing environments are required to be designed to deliver real time changes on a continuous basis. Enterprise level integration of information flow and decision support system is essential to aid this infrastructure. This also means moving decision making from simple rules to complex algorithm based rule sets, to help optimise decision making. Algorithms are not static, and supply chain analysts need to continuously tweak these to improve on optimisation as well as accommodate new constraints and new business requirements. Further, integration of value chain should be connected with backend (supplier) and frontend (customer) supply chain. This should be the new priority for business in coming years to extract rich dividends from their own investments in supply chain IT processes.