How will smart manufacturing transform the supply chain?

For manufacturers, managing the supply chain from beginning to end has been like traveling two superhighways interrupted by a long stretch of dirt road. Manufacturers have benefited from increasingly powerful tools for demand planning and logistics management – the first and last parts of their supply chains – but tracking the performance of manufacturing production across the supply chain has remained stuck in the era of clipboards, whiteboards, spreadsheets and manually assembled reports. For most companies, understanding machine capacity, throughput, efficiency, and quality across the supply chain remains a black box. Companies that rely heavily on contract manufacturers have even less visibility – challenged by partners with different systems, processes, and levels of willingness to collaborate. Today's supply chain monitoring systems lack the ability to look at machine and part/batch-level data across the supply chain, limiting a global manufacturer's ability to manage their supplier base as an integrated platform.