Today’s Challenges in Automotive and Manufacturing

Even after years of outsourcing to low-cost regions, automotive and heavy equipment manufacturers continue to face pressure to reduce their overall costs.  Numerous factors including increased competition from low-cost foreign producers and the escalating cost of raw materials and commodities contribute to the need for lean operations. The practice of expanding supply chains increases risks that have the potential to disrupt a manufacturer’s entire value network.

On-time delivery of products to customers requires the coordination of factories, suppliers, distribution centers, and logistics service providers.  The after-market requires coordination of suppliers, service providers, and logistics providers to deliver parts and services to customers.  Recall management orchestrates the delivery of parts from suppliers, distribution centers, and logistics providers to dealers.

The long information delays between trading partners simply cannot handle the dynamics of demand and supply. To profitably overcome the challenges the industry faces, organizations need to break down the silos to enable visibility, collaboration and information sharing with upstream and downstream trading partners.

Join Manufacturing Industry Leaders on One Network

Multi-Party, Many-to-Many, Multi-Echelon

The value network of automotive or heavy equipment manufacturers consists of factories, distribution centers, tier one and tier two suppliers, material suppliers, logistics providers, etc.  Many raw material suppliers supply many component suppliers that are in multiple tiers.  Tier two suppliers may supply to different tier one suppliers.  Tier one suppliers may supply to multiple assembly factories and contract manufacturers.  In addition, the logistics providers service multiple parties in the network.  Our solution connects all parties in every echelon in real-time.

Continuous, Incremental Planning & Execution Across Your Value Network

With a geographically expanded and extended network, it takes a long time to match demand and supply across the network.  A plan that takes a long time to regenerate is invalidated by events occurring in execution.  To respond to the dynamics of ever-changing supply and demand, execution results should be continuously fed back to planning in real time.  And, the planning process should incrementally incorporate actual events to adjust the plan.  Our solution continuously and incrementally orchestrates integrated planning and execution.

Real-Time Sense and Respond

Through a continuous connection with trading partners, manufacturers can harness information like consumer data in real time to sense the demand trends and drive integrated supply planning and execution. Similarly, by connecting with multi-tier suppliers, manufacturers have the opportunity to quickly and efficiently respond to demand volatility and supply variability. If commodity prices escalate, companies can mitigate the risks with the visibility in real time.

Scalable and Extensible with Accelerated Time to Value

Manufacturers have already invested heavily in solutions over time. OEMs, suppliers and the various value chain participants have their own ERP and planning systems.  Replacing all existing investments is time consuming and cost prohibitive. Our solution connects disparate solutions and embraces them for seamless integration.  In addition, it is easily scalable to handle massive volumes of transactions generated by many different systems.

Another unique offering is that we can configure your solution any way you’d like:  With our industry-first Developer Network, you can extend the One Network suite of applications to include your own intellectual property or build a new solution from scratch. All solutions are built using this robust set of developer tools. In addition, with over 29,000 companies already connected, new trading partners can join the network and immediately connect with each other, resulting in a powerful “network effect”.  In this way, our solution simply provides the most accelerated time-to-value.

One Network Solutions Enable Manufacturers to:

• Increase service levels while reducing costs
• Increase revenue with optimal multi-tier inventory deployments
• Increase market share with demand sensing and shaping
• Reduce costs
• Minimize lost sales
• Improve forecast accuracy with integrated S&OP and continuous forecasting
• Achieve complete end-to-end visibility

Supply Chain Solutions for Automotive and Manufacturing

• Intelligent Demand
• Intelligent Logistics
• Intelligent Supply
• Intelligent Service Parts
• Intelligent VAN