Supply Chain 4.0 in consumer goods
In
Supply Chain 4.0, supply-chain management applies Industry 4.0 innovations—the
Internet of Things, advanced robotics, analytics, and big data—to jump-start
performance, and customer satisfaction.
Over the last 30 years, supply chain has undergone a tremendous change.
What was once a purely operational logistics function that reported to sales or
manufacturing and focused on ensuring supply of production lines and delivery
to customers has become an independent supply-chain management function that in
some companies is already being led by a CSO—a chief supply-chain officer. The
focus of the supply-chain management function has shifted to advanced planning
processes, such as analytical demand planning or integrated sales and
operations planning (S&OP), which have become established business
processes in many companies, while operational logistics has often been
outsourced to third-party logistics providers. The supply-chain function ensures
that operations are well-integrated, from suppliers through to customers, with
decisions on cost, inventory, and customer service made from an end-to-end
perspective rather than by each function in isolation.
Digitization creates a disruption and
requires companies to rethink the way they design their supply chain. At the
same time, customer expectations are growing: recent online trends have led to
growing service expectations combined with much more detailed orders. Also, a
definite trend toward further individualization and customization is driving
strong growth of and constant changes in the SKU portfolio. The online-enabled
transparency and easy access to a multitude of options regarding where to shop
and what to buy drive the competition of supply chains.
To build on these trends, cope with
changed requirements, and enable a wide range of new technologies, supply
chains need to become much faster and much more precise.
Vision
of the future state
The digitization of the supply chain
enables companies to address the new requirements of customers, the challenges
on the supply side, and the remaining expectations in efficiency improvement.
Digitization leads to a Supply Chain 4.0, which becomes …
·
… faster. New approaches to
product distribution can reduce the delivery time of fast runners to few hours.
How? Advanced forecasting approaches, such as predictive analytics of internal
data (e.g., demand) and external data (e.g., market trends, weather, school
vacation, construction indices), when combined with machine-status data for
spare-parts demand, provide a much more precise forecast of customer demand.
What once were monthly forecasts instead become weekly—and, for the very
fastest-moving products, daily. In the future, we will even see “predictive shipping,”
for which Amazon holds a patent: Products are shipped before the customer
places an order. The customer order is later matched with a shipment that is
already in the logistics network, and the shipment is rerouted to the exact
customer destination.
·
… more flexible. Supply Chain 4.0’s ad hoc, real-time planning
allows companies to respond flexibly to changes in demand or supply, minimizing
planning cycles and frozen periods. Planning becomes a continuous process that
is able to react dynamically to changing requirements or constraints (e.g.,
real-time production-capacity feedback from machines). Even after products are
sent, agile delivery processes let customers reroute shipments to the most
convenient destination.
New business models increase the supply-chain
organization’s flexibility. Rather than maintaining resources and capabilities
in-house, companies can buy individual supply-chain functions as a service on a
by-usage basis. Service providers’ greater specialization creates economies of
scale and scope, increasing the potential for attractive outsourcing
opportunities.
An “Uberization” of transport—crowdsourced, flexible
transport capacity—will significantly increase agility in distribution networks
as well. Manufacturers may therefore see new direct-to-consumer opportunities
in what once was a playing field only for retailers.
·
… more granular. With
customers looking for more and more individualization in the products they buy,
companies must manage demand at a much more granular level, through techniques
such as microsegmentation, mass customization, and more-sophisticated
scheduling practices. Innovative distribution concepts, including drone
delivery, will allow companies to manage the last mile more efficiently for
single-piece and high-value, dense packages—fulfilling customers’ customization
needs while delivering their orders even faster than is possible today with
mass-market, standard products.
·
… more accurate. Next-generation performance management systems
provide real-time, end-to-end transparency throughout the supply chain. The
span of information reaches from synthesized top-level key performance
indicators, such as overall service level, to very granular process data, such
as the exact position of trucks in the network. The integration of that data
from suppliers, service providers, and others in a “supply chain cloud” ensures
that all stakeholders in the supply chain steer and decide based on the same
facts.
In digital performance-management systems, clean-sheet
models for warehousing, transport, or inventory set targets automatically. To
keep performance-management aspirations in focus even if supply-chain
disruptions occur, the systems will automatically adjust targets that can no
longer be achieved to more realistic aspiration levels.
We will see performance-management systems that “learn”
to automatically identify risks or exceptions, and that change supply-chain
variables to mitigate harm. These capabilities enable the automatic
performance-management control tower to handle a broad spectrum of exceptions
without human involvement, engaging human planners only for disruptive,
unplanned events. The resulting continuous-improvement cycle will push the
supply chains closer to its efficient frontier.
·
… more efficient. The automation of both physical tasks and planning
boosts supply-chain efficiency. Robots handle the material (pallets or boxes as
well as single pieces), completely automatically the warehouse process from
receiving/unloading, to putting away, to picking, packing, and shipping.
Autonomous trucks transport the products within the network.
To optimize truck utilization and increase transport
flexibility, companies share capacity through cross-company transport
optimization. The network setup itself is continuously optimized to ensure an
optimal fit to business requirements.
To create an ideal workload in the supply chain, the
system leverages the high degree of transparency and dynamic planning
approaches to drive advanced demand-shaping activities, such as special offers
for delivery time slots with low truck utilization.
Increasing
operational efficiency by leveraging Supply Chain 4.0
Supply Chain 4.0 will affect all areas of
supply-chain management. In the end, the improvements enable a step change in
service, cost, capital, and agility.
Planning
Supply-chain planning will benefit
tremendously from big data and advanced analytics, as well as from the
automation of knowledge work. A few major consumer-goods players are already
using predictive analytics in demand planning to analyze hundreds to thousands
of internal and external demand-influencing variables (e.g., weather, trends
from social networks, sensor data), using machine-learning approaches to model
complex relationships and derive an accurate demand plan. Forecasting errors
often fall by 30 to 50 percent.
Heavily automated, fully integrated demand
and supply planning breaks traditional boundaries between the different
planning steps and transforms planning into a flexible, continuous process.
Instead of using fixed safety stocks, each replenishment-planning exercise
reconsiders the expected demand probability distribution. Consequently, the
implicit safety stocks are different with every single reorder. Prices can then
be dynamically adapted to optimize profit and minimize inventories at the same
time.
In the consumer-goods industry, several of
the most prominent global conglomerates are leveraging advanced planning
approaches, and a strong interest in broader application can be observed.
Physical
flow
Logistics will take a huge step forward
through better connectivity, advanced analytics, additive manufacturing, and
advanced automation, upending traditional warehousing and inventory-management
strategies. Easy-to-use interfaces such as wearables already enable location-based
instructions to workers, guiding picking processes. Advanced robotics and
exoskeletons could have equally dramatic effects on human productivity in
warehouses.
Autonomous and smart vehicles will lead to
significant operating-cost reduction in transportation and product handling,
while at the same time reducing lead times and environmental costs. Linking
warehouses to production loading points may even enable entire processes to be
carried out with only minimal manual intervention. Finally, as production
facilities start to rely more on 3-D printing, the role of the warehouse may
change fundamentally.
Performance
management
Performance management also is changing
tremendously, with several major food companies taking a lead in making
detailed, continually updated, easily customizable dashboards available
throughout their organizations. Gone are the days when generating dashboards
was a major task and performance indicators were available only at aggregated
levels. Instead, performance management is becoming a truly operational process
geared to real-time exception handling and continuous improvement, rather than
a retrospective exercise on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Using data-mining and machine-learning
techniques, this type of revamped performance-management system can identify an
exception’s root causes by comparing it with a predefined set of underlying
indicators or by conducting big data analyses. The system can then
automatically trigger countermeasures, such as by activating a replenishment
order or changing safety-stock or other parameter settings in the planning
systems.
Order
management
Order management is improved through a
pair of measures: no-touch order processing integrates the ordering system to
the available-to-promise (ATP) process, and real-time replanning enables
order-date confirmations through instantaneous, in-memory rebuilding of the
production schedule and replenishment needs in consideration of all
constraints. The net result is reduced costs (via increased automation),
improved reliability (via granular feedback), and better customer experience
(via immediate and reliable responses).
Collaboration
The supply-chain cloud forms the next
level of collaboration in the supply chain. Supply-chain clouds are joint
supply-chain platforms between customers, the company, and suppliers, providing
a shared logistics infrastructure or even joint planning solutions. Especially
in noncompetitive relationships, partners can decide to tackle supply-chain
tasks together to save administrative costs and learn from each other.
One leading consumer conglomerate has
already found that collaboration along the value chain allows for much lower
inventories through an exchange of reliable planning data. It also slashes lead
times, thanks to instantaneous information provision throughout the entire
chain, while providing an early-warning system and the ability to react fast to
disruptions anywhere.
Supply-chain
strategy
Following the need for further
individualization and customization of the supply chain, supply-chain setups
adopt many more segments. To excel in this setting, supply chains need to
master microsegmentation. A dynamic, big data approach allows for the mass
customization of supply-chain offerings by separating the supply chain into
hundreds of individual supply-chain segments, each based on customer
requirements and the company’s own capabilities. Tailored products provide
optimal value for the customer and help minimize costs and inventory in the
supply chain.
Impact
of Supply Chain 4.0
Eliminating today’s digital waste and
adopting new technologies together form a major lever to increase the
operational effectiveness of supply chains. The potential impact of Supply
Chain 4.0 in the next two to three years is huge. Expectations include up to 30
percent lower operational costs, 75 percent fewer lost sales, and a decrease in
inventories of up to 75 percent. At the same time, the agility of the supply
chains should increase significantly.
How did we calculate these numbers? They
are based on our experience with numerous studies and quantitative
calculations. The three performance indicators are highly correlated; for
example, an improved inventory profile will lead to improved service level and
lower cost.
·
Supply-chain
service/lost sales. When customer service is poor, the
driver is either a wrong promise to the customer (e.g., unrealistic lead
times), a wrong inventory profile (ordered products are not available), and/or
an unreliable delivery of parts. Lost sales in addition occur if the required
products are not available on the shelf or in the system; customers will decide
to switch to another brand. This is true for both B2C and B2B environments.
Service level will increase dramatically when the supply
chain significantly improves interactions with the customer, leverages all
available point-of-sale data and market intelligence, improves the forecast
quality significantly (up to more than 90 percent in the relevant level, e.g.,
SKU), and applies methods of demand shaping in combination with demand sensing
to account for systematic changes and trends. With the resulting service
improvement, lost sales will decrease significantly.
·
Supply-chain costs. Driven by transportation, warehouse, and the setup
of the overall network, the costs can be reduced by up to 30 percent. Roughly
50 percent of this improvement can be reached by applying advanced methods to
calculate the clean-sheet costs (bottom-up calculation of the “true” costs of
the service) of transport and warehousing and by optimizing the network. The
goal should always be to have minimal touch points and minimal kilometers
driven while still meeting the required service level of the customer. In
combination with smart automation and productivity improvement in warehousing,
onboard units in transportation, etc., these efforts can achieve the savings
potential.
The remaining 15 percent cost reduction can be reached
by leveraging approaches of dynamic routing, Uberization of transport, use of
autonomous vehicles, and—where possible—3-D printing.
·
Supply-chain planning. The
planning tasks such as demand planning, preparation of S&OP process,
aggregated production planning, and supply planning are often time intensive
and conducted mainly manually. With advanced system support, 80 to 90 percent
of all planning tasks can be automated and still ensure better quality compared
with tasks conducted manually. The S&OP process will move to a weekly
rhythm, and the decision process will be built on scenarios that can be updated
in real time. This combination of accuracy, granularity, and speed has
implications for the other elements, such as service, supply-chain costs, and
inventory. Systems will be able to detect the exception where a planner needs
to jump in to decide.
·
Inventory. Inventory is used to
decouple demand and supply, to buffer variability in demand and supply.
Implementing new planning algorithms will significantly reduce the uncertainty
(the standard deviation of the demand/supply or forecast error), making safety
stock unnecessary. The other important variable to drive inventory is the
replenishment lead time: with more production of lot size 1 and fast
changeovers, the lead time will be reduced significantly. Also, long transport
time—say, from Asia to the European Union or the United States—will be reduced,
due to a significant increase in local-for-local production. In addition, 3-D
printing will reduce the required inventory. We would expect an overall
inventory reduction of 50 to 80 percent.
Transformation
into a digital supply chain
The transformation into a digital supply
chain requires three key enablers: a clear definition, new capabilities, and a
supportive environment. Defining the digital supply chain starts with an
understanding of the current operation’s digital waste. Capabilities regarding
digitization then need to be built; typically they require targeted recruiting
of specialist profiles. The final prerequisite is the implementation of a
two-speed architecture/organization. This means that the establishment of the
organization and IT landscape must be accompanied by creation of an innovation
environment with a start-up culture.
This “incubator” needs to provide a high
degree of organizational freedom and flexibility as well as state-of-the-art IT
systems (two-speed architecture independent of existing legacy systems) to
enable rapid cycles of development, testing, and implementation of solutions.
Fast realization of pilots is essential to get immediate business feedback on
suitability and impact of the solutions, to create excitement and trust in
innovations (e.g., new planning algorithms), and to steer next development
cycles. The incubator is the seed of Supply Chain 4.0 in the organization—fast,
flexible, and efficient
By Knut Alicke, Daniel Rexhausen, and Andreas Seyfert
FOR EXHIBITS SEE http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/supply-chain-4-0-in-consumer-goods?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1704&hlkid=02e6c1a30c6142d986c2e234830165df&hctky=1627601&hdpid=897d4318-f48e-414c-bb29-4eba5015ac91
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